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automatons, mindlessly seeking advantage over one another, colliding like billiard balls, and that the best to be hoped for in civic life is that we should channel our irredeemable self-seeking into a machinery of checks and balances that can set one interest or faction against another. Machinebrain uses malevolence to cancel out malevolence in the hopes of generating benevolence. This is the political and civic culture that has dominated American politics since the early 19th century.
    Gardenbrain, by contrast, sees citizens as gardeners, tending to the plots we share—and also as organisms within a greater garden, each affecting the next. We form each other. We are bound up in each other’s choices. We are not separate. As Paul said in Corinthians, “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” We are deeply, irretrievably interdependent. We cannot pretend that our acts and choices happen in isolation. When we start with this recognition, we have to accept more responsibility. For everything.
    If this sounds weird to you, perhaps that is because you live in a society that is, to use the acronym coined by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. In other parts of the world, Haidt shows in The Righteous Mind , people have always paid far more attention than we Americans do to relationships among things and people than to the separateness of all objects. Gardenbrain sees systems. It tempers autonomy with community.

Creating Civic Contagions
     
    Yet Gardenbrain also enables us to claim more individual power—much more power than conventional theories of citizenship attribute to us as individuals. For one of the central facts of life on an interdependent web is that every action and omission is potentially powerfully contagious. When you are compassionate and generous, society can become compassionate and generous. When you are violent and hateful, society can become violent and hateful. You can be the original cause of that contagion.
    Why? Because humans are copying machines. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” What this means is not that you are powerless but that you can set off a new chain of copying—and you do—every day with every act.
    In their groundbreaking book on social networks, Connected , Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler document the powerful and remarkable effect social networks have on us, and we on them. Exploring a variety of social phenomena, from obesity to home-buying to happiness, Christakis and Fowler show that “social networks affect every aspect of our lives. Events occurring in distant others can determine the shape of our lives, what we think, what we desire, whether we fall ill or die.”
    This is to be taken not as generalized ethical precept but rather as a reporting of social fact. Just because you don’t immediately, or perhaps ever, see the virus of behavior leap from host to host doesn’t mean it isn’t leaping. It is, relentlessly. Most people are wired for strong reciprocity, which means we repay good with good and bad with bad, and are willing to repay bad with bad even at some personal cost, just to reinforce group norms.
    As a result, even when good behavior is the minority choice in a bad setting, those who hew to good behavior can eventually prevail—and they are not suckers for doing so, but rather players of the long game over the short.
    This law of enlightened citizenship also makes it insufficient for us merely to complain about social trends we don’t like. When you read in the news about teenage pregnancies or greedy Wall Street CEOs or steroid-taking athletes, you cannot say that those people are bringing America down. You cannot distance yourself from the trend that you decry. You own it—either because you contributed to that contagion or