Loving Children: The Political Economy of Design

We are shocked when violence erupts in schoolyards or when a sixyear- old child kills another in cold blood. But the headlines, which sensationalize such tragedies, reveal only the tip of what appears to be a larger problem that, given our present priorities, will only intensify. Youthful violence is symptomatic of something much bigger evident in diffuse anger, despair, apathy, the erosion of ideals, and rising level of teen suicide (up three-fold since 1960). Nationwide, 17 percent of children are on Ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant. Adults often respond with rejection and hostility, making a bad problem worse. We hire more psychologists and sociologists to study our children and more counselors to advise them about issues such as “anger management.” As a result there are libraries of information about childhood, child psychology, child health, child nutrition, child behavior, and dysfunctional families, much of it quite beside the point. Then in desperation we hire more police to lock children up. We are crossing into a new pattern of relations between the generations, and much depends on how well we understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what is to be done about it. The deeper causes of this situation are not apparent in the daily headlines and news reports. Dysfunctional families, depression, youthful violence, and the rising use of chemicals to sedate children are symptoms of something larger. Without anyone saying as much and without anyone intending to do so, we have unwittingly begun to undermine the prospects of our children and, at some level, I believe that they know it. This essay is a meditation on the larger patterns of our time and their effects on children. My argument is that the normal difficulties of growing up are compounded, directly and indirectly, by the reigning set of assumptions, philosophies, ideologies, and even mythologies by which we organize our affairs and conduct the business of society—what was once called “political economy.” The study of political economy began with Adam Smith and continued on through Marx to the present in the work of scholars such as Yale University political scientist Charles Lindblom. Due to academic specialization and diminished public involvement in politics and community life, the field has declined.

Conservation and Conservatism

The philosophy of free-market conservatism has swept the political field virtually everywhere, and virtually everywhere conservatives have been, in varying degrees, hostile to the cause of conservation. This is a problem of great consequence for the long-term human prospect because of the sheer political power of conservative governments. Conservatism and conservation share more than a common linguistic heritage. Consistently applied they are, in fact, natural allies. To make such a case, however, it is necessary first to say what conservatism is. Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk (1982, xv–xvii) proposes six “first principles” of conservatism. Accordingly, true conservatives:… • believe in a transcendent moral order • prefer social continuity (i.e., the “devil they know to the devil they don’t know”) • believe in “the wisdom of our ancestors” • are guided by prudence • “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions” • believe that “human nature suffers irremediably from certain faults.”… For Kirk the essence of conservatism is the “love of order” (1982, xxxvi). Eighteenth-century British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, the founding father of modern conservatism and as much admired as he is unread, defined the goal of order more specifically as one which harmonized the distant past with the distant future. To this end Burke thought in terms of a contract, but not one about “things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.” Burke’s societal contract was not, in other words, about tax breaks for those who don’t need them, but about a partnership promoting science, art, virtue, and perfection, none of which could be achieved by a single generation without veneration for the past and a healthy regard for those to follow. Burke’s contract, therefore, was between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born . . . linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world” ([1790] 1986, 194–195). The role of government, those “possessing any portion of power,” in Burke’s words, “ought to be strongly and awefully impressed with an idea that they act in trust” (ibid., 190).

Twine in the Baler

I recall a true story about an Ozark farmer who telephoned his neighbors one fine June day asking for help in getting in his hay. Arriving at the hayfield, people found the farmer baling his hay, but without twine in the baler. Unbound piles of hay, which would have to be entirely reraked and rebaled, lay all over the field. The farmer, with a bottle of whiskey in his lap, was feeling no pain, as they say, and did not seem to notice the problem, nor did the dozen or so men, similarly anesthetized, standing around the pickup trucks at the edge of the field. Believing the lack of twine to be a serious problem, one of the volunteers, a newcomer to such haying operations, suggested putting a roll of twine in the baler. To which an old-timer replied: “Naw, no need for that. Ol’ Billy-Hugh [the farmer in question] is having too much fun to stop now.” This story says something important about intention. Those of us who arrived on the scene ready to work failed to understand that the purpose of the event had nothing to do with getting in hay. This was a party, haying the pretext. Once we understood that, all of us could get in the flow, so to speak. A good many things, including politics, work similarly. One of the best books ever written about politics, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Edelman 1962), develops the thesis that the purpose of political activity is often not to solve problems but only to appear as if doing so. The politics of sustainability, unfortunately, provide no obvious exception to this tendency to exalt symbolism over substance. And of symbols and words there is no end. The subject of sustainability has become a growth industry. Government- and business-sponsored councils, conferences, and public meetings on sustainability proliferate, most of which seem to be symbolic gestures to allay public anxieties, not to get down to root causes.

Technological Fundamentalism

Scene 1: Entry to a classroom building. With a deafening noise he revved up the two-cycle engine on a blower preparing to clean the leaves, paper, and cigarette butts that had accumulated in the entryway. He made considerable progress herding the debris away from the building and down the sidewalk until cigarette butts lodged in the seams in the concrete. Turning, he blasted the miscreant trash at right angles, but this only blew the debris onto the grass, posing still greater difficulties. Moving cigarette butts and bits of paper in an orderly fashion through grass is a challenge, even for a machine capable of generating gale-force winds. Then the apparatus stalled out—“down time,” it’s called. In that moment of sweet silence, I walked over and inquired whether he thought a broom or rake might do as well. “What’d you say?” he responded. “Can’t hear anything, my ears are still ringing!” I repeated the question. “S’pose so,” he said, “but they think I’m more productive with this piece of *&!@.” Perhaps he is more productive. I do not know how experts calculate efficiency in complex cases like this. If, however, the goal is to disrupt public serenity, burn scarce fossil fuels, create a large amount of blue smoke, damage lung tissue, purchase expensive and failureprone equipment, frazzle nerves, interrupt conversations, and improve the market for hearing aids, rakes and brooms cannot compete. When the technology and the task at hand are poorly matched, however, there is no real efficiency. In such cases the result, in Amory Lovins’s telling phrase, is rather like “cutting butter with a chain saw.” Scene 2: Committee meeting. I once served on what is called with some extravagance the Educational Plans and Policies Committee. It is a committee to which one is elected, or sentenced, depending on your view. In one meeting we were casually asked to pronounce our blessing on a plan to link the entire campus so that everyone would be able to communicate with everyone else via computer, 24 hours a day, without leaving dormitory rooms or offices. This, we were told, was what our competitor colleges were doing. We were assured that this was the future.

Verbicide

He entered my office for advice as a freshman advisee sporting nearly perfect SAT scores and an impeccable academic record—by all accounts a young man of considerable promise. During a 20-minute conversation about his academic future, however, he displayed a vocabulary that consisted mostly of two words: “cool” and “really.” Almost 800 SAT points hitched to each word. To be fair, he could use them interchangeably as “really cool” or “cool . . . really!” He could also use them singly, presumably for emphasis. When he became one of my students in a subsequent class I confirmed that my first impression of the young scholar was largely accurate and that his vocabulary, and presumably his mind, consisted predominantly of words and images derived from overexposure to television and the new jargon of computer- speak. He is no aberration, but an example of a larger problem, not of illiteracy but of diminished literacy in a culture that often sees little reason to use words carefully, however abundantly. Increasingly, student papers, from otherwise very good students, have whole paragraphs that sound like advertising copy. Whether students are talking or writing, a growing number have a tenuous grasp on a declining vocabulary. Excise “uh . . . like . . . uh” from virtually any teenage conversation, and the effect is like sticking a pin into a balloon. In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to 10,000 words (“Harper’s Index” 2000). This reflects not merely a decline in numbers of words but in the capacity to think. It also reflects a steep decline in the number of things that an adolescent needs to know and to name in order to get by in an increasingly homogenized and urbanized consumer society. This is a national tragedy virtually unnoticed in the media. It is no mere coincidence that in roughly the same half century the average person has learned to recognize more than 1,000 corporate logos but can recognize fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their locality (Hawken 1993, 214).

A Higher Order of Heroism

In the towns and cities across America, it is common to find a town square with a large monument to one military hero or another. Seldom, however, does one find the designers of those towns or town squares similarly memorialized. A smarter and more durable society would first acknowledge those with the foresight and dedication to design our places well, not just those who defended them in times of trouble.We need to recognize a higher order of heroism—those who helped avoid conflict, harmonized human communities with their surroundings, preserved soil and biological diversity, and created the basis for a more permanent peace than that possible to forge by violence. These are quiet heroes and heroines who work mostly out of the light of publicity. The few who do receive public acclaim are mostly reticent about the attention they get. Some like Frederick Law Olmsted, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson develop a wide international following. Most, however, labor in obscurity, content to do their work for the satisfaction of doing things well. John Lyle, professor of landscape architecture at California Polytechnic Institute, was such a man. I met John in the mid-1980s during a visit to Cal Poly. During the two days we spent together, we talked about his concept of regenerative design and his plans for the Center for Regenerative Studies, now named the Lyle Center, and walked over the site—located between a large landfill and the university. In subsequent years, John and I met at conferences and sometimes collaborated on design projects, including one located in a remote, hilly, southern rural community. Our first site visit coincided with an ice storm the previous day that had covered the region with an inch of ice. We got within a mile of the site in a rental car, but had to make our way down a long, steep hill with a sheer drop of several hundred feet on one side. For the final mile on what passed for a dirt road in that part of the country, the rental car was useless, so we began to slip, slide, and tumble our way down the hill. Near the bottom, the road banked steeply to the right, but we had to reach a trail on the left side.

The Architecture of Science

Back to the future. Suppose for a moment that you are the chair of a faculty team at Cornell University in the year 1905 and are charged with the responsibility for developing plans for a new science building. You, however, have the foreknowledge that this building is the one in which a young man from Columbus, Ohio, Thomas Midgley Jr., will one day learn his basic science. Further, you know what he will do over the course of his career. You have only this one chance to affect the mind of the man who will otherwise someday hold the world’s record for banned toxic substances by formulating leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. What would you do? Before developing the building program, could you engage your faculty colleagues in a conversation about the kind of science to be taught in the building? Would it be possible, in other words, to make architecture a derivative of curriculum? Would it be possible to signal to all entering the building that knowledge is always incomplete and that, at some scale and under some conditions, it can be dangerous? Is it possible to make this warning similar to but more effective than the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes? If you succeed, the catastrophes of lead dispersal from automobile exhaust and the thinning of stratospheric ozone from chlorofluorocarbons will not occur. Of course, the design of science buildings alone is not likely to influence young minds as much as teachers, peers, and classes do, but it is far from inconsequential. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that he could design a house for a newly married couple that would cause them to divorce within a matter of weeks. By the same logic, it is possible to design science buildings in such a way that they contribute to the estrangement of mind and nature, deadening senses and sensibilities. Indeed, this is the way we typically construct buildings. Typically, science buildings are massive and fortresslike and give no hint of intimacy with nature. Their design is utilitarian, with long, straight corridors and graceless, square rooms. Neither daylight nor natural sounds are permitted. Windows do not open.

The Limits of Nature and the Educational Nature of Limits

I teach in a liberal arts college in a small, attractive Ohio town located in an agricultural county 14 miles south of Lake Erie. The town formerly had train service that connected it easily and comfortably to the wider world. Sometime in the 1950s the trains stopped coming, and the tracks were eventually converted into a bike trail. In the intervening four decades, students arrived on campus in a variety of ways, including bus, plane, car, and a few intrepid souls still come by train to a decaying Amtrak station eight miles distant. Now many, perhaps most, come in cars that they own and that they park anywhere and everywhere in town. So like many campuses, ours is overrun by cars. And like many other colleges, we find ourselves locked in conflict with the local authorities over parking policy. Our policy is roughly to tell students, “Y’all come and bring it with you.” Unless there is a sudden outbreak of intelligence, we are likely to respond to prodding by city officials by building yet another parking lot and thereby reducing to that degree the loveliness and serenity of the town already jeopardized by urban sprawl. That, however, is an aesthetic matter on which people can and will disagree. What they cannot dispute is the cost of parking. The cost of a single parking space is estimated to be $7,000 in a paved lot and double that for a parking deck. Then there is the annual cost of policing, lighting, removing snow, and landscaping parking lots, perhaps another $1,500. From this perspective, one obvious solution is simply not to build extra parking and split the savings with those who do not to bring cars to college or drive them to work. So in return for not adding to the problem, cooperators would get a check for, say, $5,000. Those who continue to drive for whatever reason would pay a fee equal to the real costs imposed on the institution by their driving habits. Reasonable? Not according to many who believe that driving is a sacred right guaranteed somewhere in the Constitution (or was it the Declaration of Independence?) and to those who believe that automobility is now indelibly written into our behavioral genes and cannot be further altered by evolution or reason.

A Politics Worthy of the Name

Relative to the problems we face, our politics are about the most miserable that can be imagined. Those who purport to represent us and who on rare occasions try to lead us have been unable to take even the smallest steps to promote energy efficiency to avoid possibly catastrophic climatic change a few decades from now. They have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of life and protect biological diversity, soils, and forests. They ignore problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, the poisoning of our children by persistent toxins, the destruction of rural communities, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. They cannot find the wherewithal to defend the public interest in matters of global trade or even in the financing of public elections. Indeed, the more potentially catastrophic the issue, the less likely it is to receive serious and sustained attention from political leaders at any level. Our public priorities, in other words, are upside down. Issues that will seem trivial or even nonsensical to our progeny are given great attention, while problems crucial to their well-being are ignored and allowed to grow into global catastrophes. At best they will regard us with pity, at worst as derelict and perhaps criminally so. The situation was not always this way. The leadership of this country was once capable of responding to threats to our security and health with alacrity and sometimes with intelligence. In light of the dismal performance of the U.S. political system relative to the large environmental and social issues looming ahead, we have, broadly speaking, three possible courses of action (assuming that we choose to act). The first is to turn the management of our environmental affairs over to a kind of permanent technocracy—a priesthood of global managers. The idea that experts ought to manage public affairs is at least as old as Plato. In its current incarnation, some propose to turn the management of the earth over to a group of global experts. Stripped to its essentials, this means smarter exploitation of nature culminating in the global administration of the planet with lots of satellites, remote sensing, and geographic information systems experts mapping one thing or another.

None So Blind: The Problem of Ecological Denial (with David Ehrenfeld)

Willful blindness has reached epidemic proportions in our time. Nowhere is this more evident than in recent actions by the U.S. Congress to deny outright the massive and growing body of scientific data about the deterioration of the earth’s vital signs, while attempting to dismantle environmental laws and regulations. But the problem of ecological denial is bigger than recent events in Congress. It is flourishing in the “wise use” movement and extremist groups in the United States, among executives of global corporations, media tycoons, and on main street. Denial is in the air. Those who believe that humans are, or ought to be, something better than ecological vandals need to understand how and why some people choose to shun reality. Denial, however, must be distinguished from honest disagreement about matters of fact, logic, data, and evidence that is a normal part of the ongoing struggle to establish scientific truth. Denial is the willful dismissal or distortion of fact, logic, and data in the service of ideology and self-interest. The churchmen of the seventeenth century who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, for example, engaged in denial. In that instance, their blind obedience to worn-out dogma was expedient to protect ecclesiastical authority. And denial is apparent in every historical epoch as a willing blindness to the events, trends, and evidence that threaten one established interest or another. In our time, great effort is being made to deny that there are any physical limits to our use of the earth or to the legitimacy of human wants. On the face of it, the case is absurd. Most physical laws define the limits of what it is possible to do. And all of the authentic moral teachings of 3,000 years have been consistent about the dangers and futility of unfettered desire. Rather than confront these things directly, however, denial is manifested indirectly. A particularly powerful form of denial in U.S. culture begins with the insistence on the supremacy over all other considerations of human economic freedom manifest in the market economy. If one chooses to believe that economies so dominated by lavishly subsidized corporations are, in fact, free, then the next assumption is easier: the religious belief that the market will solve all problems.