Writings on economy, commons, language and other things
Would someone please explain what is “conservative” about the Bush Administration? They claim that banner, yes; and critics obediently oblige.
But look at what they do. Run up the deficit, erode local control of the schools, launch a grandiose nation-building fiasco in Iraq, regard truth-telling as optional behavior, give the federal government authority to pry into our lives. It sounds like the litany of things conservatives scold liberals for, or used to.
In my last post I reflected on how an excessive assertion of property rights can turn this supposed bulwark of freedom into a threat to it. Intellectual property is an especially virulent example. Ideas by their very nature suffuse everything; so in the name of protecting intellectual property rights the state could inject itself into just about everything. A recent example is the proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, in which Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general, is seeking new authority to tap our phones and otherwise trespass into our lives.
If Mr. Gonzalez had any historical awareness – let alone self-respect – he would know that the early writers on human freedom were worried about precisely the issues his proposal raises. Would love of lucre undermine the freedom that made prosperity possible? Would the protection of property become the entering wedge for the very tyrant that property was supposed to check? When freedom was still a live idea, rather than an encrusted doctrine and polemical cudgel, people were alert to the danger that the commercial version of it could spawn.
There was a time, long ago, when the concept of “property” was a bulwark against an oppressive and arbitrary state. But the supposed bulwark has turned into a means of infiltration; and the latest evidence is the proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007. Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General who used the election laws to try to keep Democrats from voting, now wants more authority to wiretap our phones in the name of protecting intellectual property. He seems oblivious to the alarms that raises.
Everything is in some sense an idea. We name things, hold images of them in our minds. All we know of anything, ultimately, is our idea of it. So the concept of intellectual property has a boundary problem from the start. Congress and the courts have fed this tendency through constant expansion of the copyright and patent laws. Where property rights go the powers of the state follow, as the Administration’s enforcement proposal demonstrates.
John Francis spent 17 years walking… in silence. His pilgrimage is testament to the fact that you don’t have to speak to be heard and that the tools to combat global warming are in all our hands.
We would see him almost every day, a large man pushing a stroller along the road near our house. We had just moved here – to the northern California coast, about an hour north of San Francisco. It was winter, with its drizzle and fog. Still the man walked, with a long easy gait that flowed through his entire body, as though he was carried forward by his own momentum as much as by muscular exertion. This was John Francis, I discovered, and he had walked quite a ways. The story has been told often in the US media of late. In the early 1970s he was living out here, amidst the rolling ranchlands and postcard beaches. Two oil tankers collided in the fog near the Golden Gate Bridge. Eight hundred and forty gallons of crude oil poured into San Francisco Bay and spread up the coast. People flocked to the beaches to help. Birds died in John’s hands as he tried to rescue them from the ooze.
Perhaps you have heard about the study of supposed racial bias among referees in the National Basketball Association that two economists completed recently. The New York Times gave it front page play, which was not surprising, given that it combined two story lines that the Times cannot resist – namely, racial discrimination and something that “economists say.” The study has been dismissed on many sides, including by black NBA players. It appears fairly ridiculous on its face.
But it does reveal much about the economic mind – how it cognizes reality, and what it regards as truth. This is especially useful to us advocates for the commons. Some of the same mental tics that led economists to see racial bias in the NBA have led them to see inherent “tragedy” in commons, always and by definition. The fallacies of the NBA study shed light on the economistic fallacies that have beset discussion of the commons for as long as most of us can remember.
We can become attached to the object of our loathing. Look at Bush and Iraq, or Ann Coulter and “liberals.” What would the gracious lady do without the nemesis that shapes her psyche? Would she have anything to say? So too, in a slightly different way, with Marxists and property. They can be so opposed to it that it sticks to them like glue.
This came up at the commons conference in Berkeley I wrote about last time. In my talk, I used the terms “ownership” and “property” in connection with the commons, and this caused great displeasure for another person on the panel. I was a “commodifier” he said. A commons is the opposite of property, not a version of it. I was told afterwards that this gentleman is a Marxist. But in fairness, others can feel uneasy in a less rigorously dialectical way. To say that a commons is a form of property can make it seem a carrier of the disease it is supposed to resist.
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.”)
What is it about other peoples’ junk? Last Sunday was Recycle Circus, the day in our town when people clean out their sheds and garages and bring the stuff down to the community center, which is called the Dance Palace. Volunteers unload the pick-ups and spread the items out on the street. People have a ball sifting through the old plumbing fixtures, exercise equipment and lengths of gutter.
Some do get a little grabby. They hover near the trucks as they are unloaded, ready to pounce on cabinet or desk. It made me think just a little of the wealthy matrons from the suburbs who would throng the entrance of the original Filenes Basement in Boston, and descend like vultures upon the sale bins when the doors opened. But that wasn’t the dominant note. Recycle Circus isn’t just about stuff, or even mainly. It’s a community event, a kind of festival, when you just enjoy being out with others with the winter finally gone.
Before the internet there was the postal service; and nothing showed with such clarity the views of the Founders on the importance of a free flow of information than the way they conceived and developed it. The postal system they inherited was concentrated on the Eastern seaboard. At the time of the Revolution there were 67 post offices, all in major towns. By 1831 there were 8,700 post offices, spread through the hinterlands. It was the largest postal system by far in the entire world. Great Britain had 17 post offices per 100,000 population, France had 4; and the new United States had 74.
The Americans dropped early on the Old World notion that each post office should pay for itself. France closed any office that couldn’t generate $200 in revenue, by which standard 90% of the post offices in the U.S. would have closed too. In America, by contrast, the established offices subsidized the newer ones and the whole system grew. People had access to newspapers, which the system carried at a nominal rate. The subsidy was especially important to smaller papers, many of whose subscribers lived out of town. George Washington among others argued that all papers should go free.
There is an empty lot on the main street in my town, next to the bakery, a local hang-out. For years, people have talked about buying it to create a space for people to come and gather. But recently a friend and I said, ‘Why wait?’ We fixed up a couple of old benches and set them away from the street, under a tree, which seemed vaguely park-like. Within a week, people had moved the benches right up to the pavement, which is where they have stayed ever since.
Not long after the bench-moving, I happened upon a book called The Social Life of Public Spaces by William H Whyte {1}. Whyte spent much of his life studying how people use such spaces. He found that there are recurring patterns, a kind of economy of human interaction. Among other things, people like to sit near the flow of life, rather than in secluded corners – which is exactly what had happened in our commons.