ABSTRACT
“Social gardening” would be every bit as apt a way to describe the efforts of people to alter, in big and little ways, their behavior, the behavior of others, and the institutional frameworks in which they all live. Even those of us who prefer the decentralized, naturalistic, bottoms-up approach of an English-style social garden to the rigid lines and neatly trimmed hedges of the French style are advocating a type of gardening, at a minimum, a set of policies favoring some sorts of behaviors and social arrangements over others. If a limited form of cultural relativism is worth salvaging from the wreckage of cultural determinism, another of its artifacts deserves to be jettisoned altogether: the treatment of culture as a political football. As problematic as modern society may be for organisms like us who evolved to deal with a different environment, it could be worse.
