Commons – Page 4 – Jonathan Rowe

Bust the Grid: Back Alleys Become Commons

The built environment gets inside us with the force of habit. Once things are constructed it soon seems that they have been that way forever. Even people who thought the World Trade Center was a monstrosity (myself for one) were unsettled by the hole in the sky after 9/11, and not just because of the barbarity of the attack. It wasn’t just the towers that were gone but normality itself.

As with structures, so with the underlying template. It is hard for an American to envision development on any pattern other than the standard grid. Rectangular lots, lined up like ledger entries; yours there and mine here. The grid emerged for the purpose of turning land into a fungible commodity. It is obtuse to the landscape and to the social needs of the people who inhabit it. Yet the grid determines the shape of our settlements and therefore, in large degree, the pathways of our daily lives. Few things so illustrate the tragedy of commodity thinking.

Who Decides Who’s Sick?

Back when, Ralph Nader used to ask college audiences, “Who defines what a problem is in America today?” Who decides that tired hair, say, is a problem of epochal proportions, while the decimation of species and the befouling of the air flit only episodically across the public screen, rarely long enough to change behavior in any significant way?

Nader was talking about the ability of the marketing industry to channel thought in the direction of problems for which commodities appear to be an answer. Rightward polemicists scoff at the notion that advertising actually could influence an independent and free-thinking people. They don’t explain why corporate leaders, “rational decision makers” that they are, would devote over a quarter of a trillion dollars every year to this purpose anyway.

Consumed by Commerce

Part of the spell that the term “the market” casts upon our minds is that it appears to refer to something specific—but it does not. “The market” of policy is not the world but rather a way of looking at the world—a system of belief, a mental overlay, that has been projected into all space and defines it, regardless of what is actually there. To many, it is the functional equivalent of God.

But in the beginning this was not the case. Markets were particular events, much the way street fairs and farmers’ markets are today. There was society, and part of that society was times and places for commercial exchange. The process by which actual markets have become “the market” has brought a kind of economic failure that economists don’t even know how to see. Their prescriptions, in fact, are making the problem worse, because they are displacing further the productivity of the social commons and stripping away the generative social functions that markets used to serve.

Billboards in Space, Accomplices in Enclosure

The greatest ally of the corporate trespasser is our human tendency to forget. So long as a violation lingers in the memory there is a possibility of doing something about it. But when outrage dies, and along with it the memory that things could be different, then the deed is done and the enclosure is complete.

How many people today remember when streetcars traversed our major cities, until oil and automobile companies contrived to do them in? How many think, when they peruse the offerings on commercial television, “Wait a minute. Those airwaves are ours.” Not that long ago, people would be outraged at the thought of junk food ads and vending machines in public schools. Now they are a new normal, and are greeted with a shrug.

Conservative Commoners

About half a century ago, a prominent writer described automobiles as “mechanical Jacobins” for their disruptive effects on American life and mores. It was not a young Ralph Nader rehearsing for Unsafe At Any Speed. . It was Russell Kirk, intellectual patriarch of the modern conservative movement, writing in his seminal book The Conservative Mind.

The difference between the two is instructive. Nader was writing from a standpoint of utility. He did not object to the social and cultural impacts of cars, not outwardly at least. His argument was that they weren’t safe. Kirk by contrast was talking values – the nature of our communities and ultimately of ourselves. This is the deeper territory that liberals in America pretty much have forfeited, with their focus on such things as consumer protection and safety. Safety is important; but we humans cannot live on it alone.

The Myopia of Price

Why is the commons invisible? Why does an air conditioner – and the electricity it uses – count in the computations of economic product, but not the cooling provided by shade trees? Why does Disneyland count, but not a national park or forest; Prozac, but not traditional neighborhoods and Main Streets that provide human connection and comfort without the need for pharmaceutical concoctions?

The reason, in a word, is money. What is called “economics” today is the world as seen through the myopic and tendentious lens of money and price. If something is transacted through money it has reality; if not it does not exist. It makes no difference that trees provide shade and neighbors provide comfort; it makes no difference that they serve real needs. They are not sold for money and therefore they do not count. As a result, the more “the economy” destroys these things – the more it displaces that which is free with commodities that we have to buy for money – the more the economy is growing and the better life is getting, or so we are told.

Perambulate That Parking Space

There was a time when commoners had legal rights, and could take matters into their own hands when it came to dealing with trespassers. Centuries ago in England, people with common rights to land would “perambulate” it – what a wonderful word — to make sure no bossy lords had installed fences or gates. Laborers might carry “an axe, a mattock, and an iron crow…for the purpose of demolishing any building or fence which had been raised without permission,” says E.P. Thompson, the British scholar, in his book Customs In Common, quoting a contemporary source.

These evictions had an established legal basis. Coke’s Institutes (an abridged version) noted that “[I]f the Lord doth enclose any part, and leave not sufficient common…commoners may break down the whole inclosure.” Today we can only wish. But while we don’t have many legal rights to stand up to the enclosers, there still are ways to challenge the psychology of defeat, and help people remember what they have lost.

Defending the Commons, Defending Life

In a sense, President Bush has done humanity a service. He has provided a foil in a drama that was lacking one, and set in motion a politics that did not before exist.

The president did not invent the assault on that which we Americans own together—our air and water, our public lands, our Main Streets and public spaces, our public domain of culture and knowledge, and the rest. The enclosure of these for corporate gain has been going on for decades.

The Comedy of the Neglected Private

In the belief system called “economics” it is an article of faith that a commons is inherently tragic. Inherently and by definition. What belongs to all belongs to none; and only private ownership can rescue a resource from the sad fate that will otherwise befall it. Just look at urban brown fields, clear-cut forests and the strip mines in Appalachia. Oh wait. Those were owned privately, by corporations.

Economics texts nortwithstanding, private ownership is no guarantee of wise use, only of use that yields short-term monetary gain. At the same time, common ownership has worked wonderfully throughout the ages, provided there is a governing structure of law or local custom. Today I’d like to add a corollary – the comedy of the neglected private. Private ownership actually can help a commons, provided the owners don’t pay much attention and don’t worry about financial gain the way the textbooks say they should.

Slouching to Enclosure Land: How We’ll Lose Those Parks

Most of life is habit. We like to think that we think and choose. Economists have made a religion out of this assumption. But in daily life, what we think, say and do is pretty much what we thought, said and did yesterday, and the day before. Is there anyone out there who could not predict how the Wall Street Journal editorial page would come out on a given issue, or the clerics in Iran for that matter? Most of us are less extreme versions; but still the mechanism takes over, and the grooves run deep.

Dictators and corporate marketers know how to use this to their advantage. Monsanto knows that if it gets genetically engineered seeds into the food chain, people will accept them sooner or later. Genetic engineering will become a new normal. The mental grooves will take shape around it, as will the practices of the food industry itself. PR can create an enabling mental atmospheric to ease the process. And once done it will be hard to reverse. Habits are easier to make than to break, as the old saying goes.