Writings on economy, commons, language and other things
Jonathan Rowe It was not accidental that the man who embedded this version into the political vernacular, Ronald Reagan, was himself reprising a role from his “B” Westerns. The late ex-president didn’t just memorize his scripts—he believed them. Not for the only time, he chose a congenial fiction over an inconvenient reality.
Start with the notion that wealthy Americans all have made their money through honest endeavor, and that taxes therefore are a form of theft.
A visitor to rice country in the Philippines these days encounters scenes that don’t add up. Amid the bamboo houses and scrawny yapping mutts are sturdy cement dwellings with televisions and other appliances and maybe even a computer and an SUV. The rice fields next to these homes are no bigger than the others. Where does the money come from?
In Filipino cities, meanwhile, American-style mega-malls, with Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, are rising up near sprawling squatter colonies and landscapes of grimy cinder block and corrugated rust. Inside, you almost could be in an air-conditioned First World cocoon, except for the security at the doors, and the bathrooms without toilet seats.
Almost forty years ago, Garrett Hardin, a biologist, bid us to “picture a pasture that is open to all.” This pasture was everywhere and nowhere, and inhabited by dimwits enlisted from the economics texts. They had no history or social affinities, no context of custom or law, just an internal calculator of their own immediate financial gain. From that hypothetical Hardin spun out the “tragedy of the commons,” which has been a staple of the economics texts ever since. It was theology rather than economics, which made for a congenial match.
Many commentators have pointed out that if Hardin had bothered to observe the world, he would have found that commons often have worked wonderfully – and continue to do so to this day. He didn’t have to go far. The evidence was practically right outside his window, historically speaking, in the open pastures of the old American West.
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.”)