Berkeley, California is a place of great originality but also of an accusatory and tendentious certitude that could drive you to the political Right if the same thing didn’t flourish over there. (Some go anyway.) The originality is found especially in  architecture and design, and in a culture of common spaces.  The grim certitude has strongholds in the precincts of gender, ethnicity and race.  Both were on display at a conference on the Crisis of the California Commons sponsored by the California Studies Association this past weekend.

The positive energies prevailed by a pretty wide margin.  But there was enough of the other to provide a cautionary note.   There is a tendency on the political Left to turn the concept of the commons into a projection screen for every pet cause and belief, and to attack those who do not do the same.  A friend recalled afterwards something Wendell Berry once wrote: “Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say.”  (That was in an essay called “Distrust of Movements.”)

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