Sunday, March 10, 2013
“FREEDOM IN THE COMMONS BRINGS RUIN TO ALL”
by David B. Sutton, Ph.D.
This is the dramatic conclusion of Garrett Hardin’s classic article entitled, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Science, 162 (1968):1243-1248). In it, he revived an old concern; in fact, one of the central issues of political philosophy: how to balance the public welfare against the rights and desires of individuals to act in their own self interest. Hardin used the English village commons as a metaphor for any resource or life-support system that is freely available to all members of a community. Although the issue can be stated in many different ways, Hardin’s dramatic statement of the problem in these terms has made the commons an important analytical concept for environmentalists and become required reading in the environmentalist canon. (1)
Hardin argues that whenever a resource is made freely available to all individuals of a community, each acting rationally in his or her own self-interest, is locked into a logical pattern that, in time, quarantees the exhaustion or destruction of the common resource.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in our current situation of Global Warming where humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of a political ideology that makes it impossible to address.
Remorseless Working of the Logic of the Commons
The definition of the commons is very specific and important in Hardin’s construction. It refers to a commonly held resource available to all with no restriction on its use. All the rest of the analysis flows from this specific definition. He also was very specific about how he was using the word “tragedy,” taking his definition from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. “The essence of dramatic tragedy,” wrote Whitehead, “… resides in the solemnity of the remorseless workings of things.” There could hardly be a more elegant description of our current environmental situation. The tragedy, in other words, is the existence of an unregulated commons which inevitably leads to its destruction.
The essence of this particular tragedy, wrote Hardin, has to do with how rational, individual acts add up to collective catastrophes. The “commons” in the article was a public pasture for sheep. Each shepherd, Hardin explained, is rationally motivated to put as many sheep out to graze as possible, because it clearly benefits the shepherd, and nothing prevents him from doing so. If the sheep degrade the commons in the process (which they will do upon approaching the pasture’s carrying capacity), the degradation is a cost spread among all other shepherds. No individual shepherd will immediately feel the negative impacts of his supposedly rational decision. But when all shepherds make the same “rational” decision, their growing number of sheep will ultimately destroy the commonly-held pasture.
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is now part of the basic canon of environmental literature, but in my estimation, has been largely misinterpreted and misused. That is often the fate of uncomfortable conclusions. While Hardin attempts to explain humanity’s propensity for ignoring difficult facts, claiming that “natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial,” I am afraid that most readers miss this point as they, themselves, verify its validity.
Hardin’s point is that people have very little incentive to limit their own use, because they received the benefits, while society and Nature bear most of the costs. “The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.” His essay was, in effect, an argument for voluntary-yet-mandatory restraint: “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” “The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms, is by relinquishing freedom in the commons, and that very soon,” he wrote.
I have been using Hardin’s construction of the commons for over thirty years in my college teaching. It is a very powerful explanatory tool exposing the fundamental dynamic underlying most of today’s environmental problems calling up some very important and somewhat uncomfortable conclusions that must be dealt with if we are to create a sustainable society (2).
His reasoning was sound. His foresight was prophetic. He was heard, acknowledged, applauded, then ignored or worse co-opted and used to justify large-scale privatization of common resources.
The free exercise of individual rights should bring with it the responsibility for the consequences. But the commons effectively separates the right to commit an act from the responsibility of committing it. The means to avert the Tragedy of the Commons requires that responsibility for the use of the commons be assigned.
Most environmental problems, around the world, whether occurring in a capitalist or communist state, stem from a masquerading system of the commons. Under the circumstances of this system, there is no rational solution. The system must be changed. Responsibility must be assigned.
Assigning Responsibility in the Commons
Hardin discussed two basic ways in which people have sought to extricate themselves from dilemmas involving commons. The free access to the resource must be replaced by some kind of regulation — responsibility has to be assigned.
In the case of individualism, the commons is privatized and the resulting owners then take charge of the resource (i.e. the ‘enclosure movement’)
In the case of collectivism, the group, usually represented by some smaller set of individuals, agrees to a binding program of mutual restraint. There are many examples of traditional communities who have maintained their commons for centuries by developing and abiding by mutually agreed upon constraints (rules).
Either of these strategies rescues the commons and the individuals involved from the self-defeating logic of a freely accessible commons.
Both the ‘Libertarian Right’ and the ‘Anarchist Left’ don’t like this notion at all– neither like regulation. In fact, too many in our society, with their anti-government zeal, are in denial of this inevitable conclusion. They have bought the idea of the market as regulator –which is no regulation at all– with no responsibility assigned there is no regulation. The market merely allocates resources among the players of the game while effectively excluding most from the playing field altogether.
It is not surprising that the individualist solution would be favored in the West reinforced by its obsession with “free-market fundamentalism” (3) even though the failings of such an approach (exclusion of the many for the benefit of the few…. etc.) are well known. Market-obsessed society with its “invisible hand” fiction, has over-emphasized the enclosure (privatization) strategy. But it is not the only solution and was not the only thing first suggested by Hardin.
And while there are also problems with the collective approach as well (“who watches the watcher”… etc.), many common resources just cannot be divided and split (no matter how hard the economist tries) and they must be collectively administered – This is not a conclusion rabid individualists are comfortable with. But there really is no logical choice other than collective responsibility.
Responsibility must be assigned and as Edmund Burke once so eloquently put it, the less within the more needed without.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
In present-day society it appears that neither individuals nor corporations are willing to abide by any “social contract” limiting their appetites.
I have been concerned for years that Hardin’s brilliant insight was being co-opted by economists to justify commodifying and privatizing common resources and arguing that the fictious “invisible hand “ of the market would orchestrate the best outcome for the common good. An absurd idea on its face and believed by far too many. It is the ultimate form of “mind pollution.”
In a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
“Freedom is the recognition of necessity” Hegel
Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that are vigorously opposed; cries of “rights” and “freedom” fill the air. But what does “freedom” mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual restraint, they become free to pursue other goals. It was Hegel who said, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.”
The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning unrestricted freedom in the commons. No technical solution can rescue us from the tragic outcome of overexploitation. Freedom in the commons will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible environmental behavior. The temptation must be resisted because, as Hardin shows, an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing unrestricted freedom in the commons, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”— and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning this kind of rabid individualism. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
Indivisible Global Commons
Increasingly, it seems likely that if we are to avoid worldwide disaster, we must learn to conceptualize the world as a single entity. There are a number of commons shared by all the peoples of the World. The atmosphere and the world’s oceans are two examples. In addition to this, all of the people of all the nations are increasingly dependent upon increasingly scarce supplies of such things as food, water, oil, gas, drugs, and such intangibles as information and technologies.
It is hard to imagine that most of these can be successfully privatized. It is apparent that placing once commonly-held resources in private hands does not necessarily render them safe from over-exploitation. In addition, all commonly-held resources cannot be reduced to private ownership. Air, water, the outer atmosphere, oceans, ecological cycles, biological populations, and most other environmental resources (ecological services) are not easily divided and cannot be effectively privatized. The alternative is to place the common resource in the collective hands of the group – to place it under public ownership and political controls.
The nation-states and multi-national corporations represent our best efforts in this direction, but they have had limited success solving global commons problems (4). On the other hand, if access to them is not regulated soon, they will be damaged and then destroyed just as effectively as the English village commons. It seems likely that we will have to learn to think of the entire human population as a powerful community that can reach binding mutual agreements for mutual restraint.
Reeling in the Voracious appetite of Corporate Capitalism
Too many live in the surreal fantasy world of the economist and need a healthy dose of ecological reality. As things daily worsen (there is really no movement towards any kind of ecological reasoning), those in charge continue to apply more of the cause as cure (i.e same economic reasoning). More and more the story of our grand success as a species is told by the hubris of the arrogantly rich who have no sense of bio/physical reality — no appreciation for the ultimate source of their accumulated fortunes. They are fundamentally ecological illiterates.
It is here where the concept of “the commons” can begin to inform policy and action. This is not an economic analysis, it is an ecological and political one. It is about carrying capacity of finite resources and collective dilemmas. None of these concepts enter into the tidy little internally consistent box of economic analysis where a concern for limits or equity does not exist.
We can thank economists for Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons being considered primarily an economic analysis where they have co-opted it
and used it as a justification for the “privatizing “ economic strategy that they prefer. And we must also admit that an ideological aversion to collective solutions dominates mainstream American society (with knee-jerk anti-government, anti-union, anti-socialist reactions).
But as we have seen, this economic solution represents ONLY ONE OF THE STRATEGIES alluded to in Hardin’s analysis. For instance, I would much rather have National Parks managed as public domain, than see their “enclosure” by private interests. But for us to maintain them collectively we must regulate their use.
Unfortunately, the propensity that Hardin feared of the administrative bodies (BLM, Park Services, EPA, FDA, Dept. of Agriculture, for example) becoming corrupted by those it is to regulate, is very real. But not inevitable! As Hardin said; “The great challenge facing us now (AND THIS WAS NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AGO) is to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedback.” Clearly not the concern of the economist only advocating private enterprise solutions.
Unfortunately the economic worldview has defined what we call “rational” behavior. I, for one, would like it to include enlightened behavior from beings that see themselves as members of a larger living community spanning many generations. I will venture to say, however, that this definition of mine would be considered quite irrational in public discourse because the primary definition used throughout the industrialized world (indeed it is what defines the industrialized world) is a product of very limited short-term economic “reasoning.”
The short-term economic logic that we are told represents rational behavior discounts the future, subordinates all non-monetary value. IT IS MYOPIC, unjust, and ecologically unsound, if not down right criminal. But it is the reasoning universally used. The fact is this entire world of corporate capitalism reinforces at every turn the taking of immediate personal gain to the exclusion of the common good. Given that, how can we mitigate the impact this “rational” behavior is having on the commons. That is the issue at hand.
Global Warming is a Tragedy of the Commons
Hurricane Sandy, and the superstorms that will follow, are not just acts of nature—they are a Tragedy of the Commons” — products of a massive theft of the atmospheric commons shared by all life on the planet. Every dollar of profit made by fossil fuel companies relies on polluting our shared atmosphere with harmful greenhouse gases, stealing what belongs to us all. If we don’t understand the history of the commons, we will have a hard time recognizing what—and who—is responsible for today’s climate crisis.
Most written history that most of us learn, which as we know is primarily written by the victors, silences the voices of common people, who struggled for centuries to maintain their traditional rights to subsist from common lands—rights enshrined in 1217 in the Charter of the Forest, the often-overlooked sister document to the Magna Carta.
Of course, this history is not limited to land enclosures during the British agricultural revolution. Around the world, European colonizers spent centuries violently “enclosing” indigenous peoples’ land throughout the Americas, India, Asia, and Africa. The Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva explains why this process was a necessary aspect of colonialism:
“The destruction of commons was essential for the industrial revolution, to provide a supply of natural resources for raw material to industry. A life-support system can be shared, it cannot be owned as private property or exploited for private profit. The commons, therefore, had to be privatized, and people’s sustenance base in these commons had to be appropriated, to feed the engine of industrial progress and capital accumulation.” (5)
The enclosure of the commons has been called the revolution of the rich against the poor.
One of the few places where conflict over the commons shows up in history treatments is the discussion of how Native American and European concepts of landownership differed. These discussion could provide a valuable opportunity to analyze the differences. Instead, they usually dismiss Native American notions of property as quaint and in the end—just like the struggle of the Diggers—somewhat tragic in the grand scheme of things.
Every treatment I’ve seen presents the buying and selling of land as a normal—even inevitable—part of human history. What’s missing from all accounts is the naked truth that land inhabited and used in common by English peasants and Native Americans had to first be stolen, before it could ever become the private property that can be bought and sold today.
In fact, the growth of industrial capitalism has been predicated on the private enclosure of the natural world. And these enclosures have always met with resistance. We need to learn this alternative narrative for at least two reasons. First, it encourages critical conversation about how “economic growth” has been used to justify the private seizure of the earth’s resources for the profits of a few—while closing off those same resources, and decisions about how they should be used, to the rest of us. Even more importantly, this conversation about history can help us to see today’s environmental crises—from the loss of global biodiversity to superstorm Sandy—for what they really are: the culmination of hundreds of years of privatizing and commodifying the natural world.
The private enclosure of nature continues today; it’s just hard to see. Like the proverbial fish surrounded by the water of the “free market,” it’s easy to assume that fossil fuel companies have some god-given right to profit from polluting our atmospheric commons. Few people recognize this atmospheric grab because our conditioning has erased all memory of our collective right to the natural commons.
So here is where we are today. Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address.
By the late 1980s, when it became clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.
The cult of free-market fundamentalism purports to liberate the market from political interference. The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like this. What the disciples of this cult call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks more like the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich. Free-market Fundamentalism is little more than a self-righteous justification for plutocracy.
The doctrine was clearly applied in Chile in 1973, as former students of the University of Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman’s extreme prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked alongside General Pinochet to impose a programme that would have been impossible in a democratic state. The result was an economic catastrophe, but one in which the rich – who took over Chile’s privatized industries and unprotected natural resources – prospered exceedingly.
This fundamentalist liturgy was taken up by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It was forced upon the poor world by the IMF and the World Bank. By the time James Hansen presented the first detailed attempt to model future temperature rises to the US Senate in 1988, the doctrine was being implanted everywhere.
As we saw in 2007 and 2008 (when “free-market” governments were forced to abandon their principles to bail out the banks), there could scarcely be a worse set of circumstances for addressing a crisis of any kind. Until it has no choice, the self-hating state will not intervene, however acute the crisis or grave the consequences. Free-market fundamentalism protects the interests of the faithful elite against all comers.
Preventing climate breakdown – the four, five or six degrees of warming now predicted for this century by “green extremists”, like, er, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and PriceWaterhouseCoopers – means confronting the oil, gas and coal industry. It means forcing that industry to abandon the four-fifths or more of fossil fuel reserves that we cannot afford to burn. It means cancelling the prospecting and development of new reserves – what’s the point if we can’t use current stocks? – and reversing the expansion of any infrastructure that cannot be run without them.
But the self-hating state cannot act. Captured by interests that democracy is supposed to restrain, it can only sit back and watch as the economic juggernaut chews up what is left of the World’s Commons. Confrontation is forbidden, action is a mortal sin.
Climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. The useless Earth Summit in June; the feeble measures debated in Doha; and the lame face-saving pronouncements of governments expose the greatest and widest ranging failure of market fundamentalism: its incapacity to address our crises of the Commons.
The legacy of current carbon emissions is enough to smash anything resembling human civilization into splinters. Complex societies have sometimes survived the rise and fall of empires, plagues, wars and famines. They won’t survive six degrees of climate change, sustained for a millennium. In return for 150 years of explosive consumption, much of which does nothing to advance human welfare, we are atomizing the natural world and the human systems that depend on it.
The climate talks in Doha and the sound and fury of the government’s new measures probe the current limits of political action. Go further and you break the covenant with power, a covenant both disguised and validated by an intolerant belief system of greed.
It is the ideology used, often retrospectively, to justify a global grab of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be addressed until the doctrine is challenged by effective political alternatives.
In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the crises which now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilization against plutocracy.
We must start to articulate a new politics: one that sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a higher purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that puts the survival of people and the living world above the survival of a few favored industries. In other words, a politics that belongs to us all, not just the super-rich.
Conclusion
“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a hard-hitting analysis firmly grounded in biophysical reality. Few have offered so much insight from a comprehensive ecological worldview and deserved to be read and digested. I want to encourage you all to read “The Tragedy of the Commons.” It helps us to understand why so much feedback from Nature gets ignored by the World: because it seems “rational” to ignore unpleasant or inconvenient information. Worse, the systems rewards those who ignore such signals at least in the short term. Built into the structure of our economy is a set of perverse incentives. We get rewarded for doing the destructive thing (like hunting down the last fish in the ocean) and punished for doing the right thing.
Combine these structural challenges with the glacial slowness with which Nature begins to send its distress signals; the relatively limited listening posts set up by humanity to receive those signals (not to mention the denial of most to the ensuing warning signals) and our jittery “fight or flight” nervous responses which are more geared to survival on the savannah than planetary management, it is all too easy to understand why we are in such a predicament.
The enclosure of our commons has been accompanied by an enclosure of our imaginations. We need to re-claim what it is to be “realistic” from the falsehoods of “there is no alternative to free-market economics.” This is not a call for pure imaginations of some future utopia. It is not a fantastic plea for a sudden and complete dissolving of all the social structures that currently pattern our lives. Instead, it is a call to take what is already going on all around us, all the time — cooperation, sharing, empathy — and let these aspects of our humanity guide our future. To begin to re-structure our social systems towards the things we most desire and value — caring for and cooperating with one another, true participation, democracy, and human freedom and the preservation of our common life-support systems — and in doing so, to move towards a more sustainable future.
NOTES:
(1)Garrett Hardin was a prominent biologist and geneticist, in producing “The Tragedy of the Commons,” he was developing a unifying framework for a much larger class of “collective dilemmas.” In his delightful little book, “Voyage on the Spaceship Beagle: New Ethics for Survival” (Viking, 1975) he continued the analysis, exploring the folly that having destroyed the Earth as our home, humans set out to colonize space as their new home … the major point being, it was fundamentally our flawed ethics on earth that contributed to its demise as a livable habitat for us and using the same ethics in space we will do just the same – we need a new set of ethics… and, of course the new ethics to manage the commons is a central issue.
(2)I went to work with Garrett Hardin at the University of California soon after the publication of “The Tragedy of the Commons.” I was impressed with his brilliant insights on how biological reality ought to inform public policy – in what he called “human ecology”. I have the curious distinction of being his first, last and only Ph.D. student. “The Tragedy of the Commons” is one of his most powerful arguments, which I have used in every course I have taught for the past thirty years. My “The Commons: A Continuing Dilemma,” Antaeus Monograph #1, 1980) deals, in detail, with the two basic approaches to resolving the dilemma and their pros and cons (available upon request).
(3)”Free-market fundamentalism” is the most powerful secular cult in the history of human kind –an intolerant belief system (not a scientific construct). It is characterized by an unquestioning belief in the manifest destiny of technological development and the canons of corporate capitalism. The most immoral cult in the world today where means are the ends in themselves– no discussion of what we should be doing, only absolute devotion to the system that is doing it. Just let the godly invisible hand direct the market to where we should go and Divine Providence will reward the faithful. The non-believer (such as environmentalists/ecologists, social/union activists, social democrats/socialists,…etc) can just go to hell (they are the devil’s disciples, anyway). This goes to amazing extremes of clarity with high-tech ponzi and other finance derivative schemes.”
“This kind of circular, self-perpetuating analysis is symptomatic of a society in serious ideological trouble. We are so inundated by free market liturgy that we have become possessed by the dynamics of a cult: a belief system that can’t tolerate any opinion or event that doesn’t serve the speculative economy. Its adherents can’t understand motivation in any other terms than profit-mindedness: they can’t imagine alternatives to the logic of corporate capitalism. “
“Those who would so blasphemously question profit over people become the latest-variety “enemy of the state.” They must be eliminated or, better, assimilated– saved by an ever-growing force of cult missionaries.”
(Excerpts from “Free-Market Fundamentalism,” The Universal Curmudgeon, 2001, available upon request)
(4)The World community has had only limited success with previous attempts at regulating Global Commons such as the Partial and Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaties and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Unfortunately all too
often they are based on attempts to privatize and commoditize our common heritage.
The most egregious violation of the commons are recent attempts to patent life itself –seeds, plants, animals, isolated DNA sequences, even entire human genomes.
(5)[bad link] http://www.vandanashiva.org