Tragedy of the Commons

Reform starts with a little platoon

I had a wonderful childhood growing up in a bucolic mining community during the 1950s. The street I lived on was populated with war time houses on small lots, but fences were rare and every yard was part of the commons. The forest that started a block from my house was unbroken to the Arctic sea and I lived close to the US border. That, at least, is what I thought when my gang of friends and I ventured into the treed expanse of our commons each day.

A few years ago, I returned to my childhood home and was horrified by the dystopic nature of the street I had lived on. All the front yards were lined with several vehicles in various states of disrepair and well-groomed lawns and houses were nowhere to be found. It looked more like something from the movie Road Warrior. So much for the bucolic commons of my youth.

Recently I walked through a part of the city in which, six or seven years ago, I used to meet and talk with a group of homeless guys on my way to work. Things had changed dramatically in a very dystopian way. The inert bodies of young men unconscious from fentanyl lay in gutters. Human shells stood bent over, swaying on the sidewalks. I watched a young woman trying to move a semi-conscious person off the street as the traffic rushed by. So much for the commons of my working career.

It is one thing to see the coarsening of our language and wonder at the culture that allows this to happen. It is another thing to see the coarsening of our commons and wonder where this is all heading. It is easy to put one’s head down and rush by without taking note of such coarsening.

The phenomenon of the coarsening of what is jointly owned and hence unowned, that is, the commons, is known as the tragedy of the commons. If no one is designated to look after it or everyone is tasked with looking after it, then it won’t be looked after.

When I get home, I will close the door to this dystopia.

I read an article in a local webzine that pointed out the increasing danger and degradation of our dystopic cities and called on citizens to be outraged and ashamed that we would continue to elect politicians who refuse to deal with this tragedy of the commons in a way that treats those affected with the dignity befitting human beings. But these are difficult problems and maybe there are no solutions.

In 1998 I made two consulting trips to Cuba. On my first visit to the country, I walked along the famous Malecon of Havana looking for El Floridita, the bar that Ernest Hemingway made famous. As I walked along, I was thronged by approximately twenty young women inviting me to buy their sexual services. It was pathetic and very off putting. What sort of country would allow such a spectacle in its most famous and touristic location? I did not start out being a fan of Cuba and this experience consolidated that perspective. A month later, on a second visit to Cuba, my trip to El Floridita was a tourist’s delight. Gone were the girls and the 57 Chevies were the only beauties to prowl the streets. What miracle had caused such a radical transformation? My Cuban colleagues shrugged their shoulders and said,

“Fidel doesn’t like prostitution on the streets anymore.”

Just like that. One influential guy wanted a change and change there was.

Georgian England was famous for the dirtiness, depravity and poverty of its cities. The term “drunk as a Lord” was coined to describe the coarseness of Parliament and the drunken behaviour of the upper classes. One in four girls in London was a prostitute. In 1787 William Wilberforce made a pact with himself following his conversion to Christianity.

“God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners”.

Wilberforce, who had been a favourite invitee to the important parties in London due to his wealth and remarkable singing voice, noticed the coarsening of his culture and set about to change things. One of the first things he did was to persuade King George III to issue a proclamation encouraging piety and virtue – something sadly lacking in the lives of some of the king’s own children.

By bringing attention to the coarsening of his culture, the tragedy of the commons, Wilberforce and his friends set in motion the forces that would create schools for working class children, established the Royal Society for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals, established Sierra Leone as a colony for ex slaves and, in 1833 abolished slavery in England and its colonies. Today we think of the Victorian Age in England as a time of moral propriety and starchy manners rather than drunken lords and abused women. Quite a lot can be done when someone steps up even when the commons is defined by such deep tragedy.

So is it possible for our cities to clean up their commons, their streets, parks and alleys? Is the coarseness of our society to be accepted with a sad shrug of the shoulders as we close the doors of our houses against the maelstrom of cultural chaos? Are there really no solutions?

I think there are solutions, but it all starts when we open our eyes to see the degradation of the commons and point it out to those who share those commons with us. That will lead to the “little platoons” that Edmund Burke credited with changing the social situation in Georgian England. Someone may call a meeting and from the meeting perhaps a committee will be formed. And maybe the committee will look at treatment options for the drug addled and cleanup options for the streets and a few people will write cheques and letters will be sent to politicians and newspaper editorial boards. In time election campaigns will mention the “mess on our streets” and there will be votes to be gained by addressing the issues.

The trajectory of such actions is unknowable. Wilberforce made his declaration to reform manners with no plan in place. He noticed a problem and set his mind to finding a solution. The writer who pricked my conscience didn’t know that I would write this and maybe someone reading this will think,

“Hmmm… maybe there is something I can do.”

It would be nice to have a Fidel Castro who can flick a switch to change the coarseness of the culture but the joy of being part of a culture is working to improve it without leaving it to some guy who will then remove all other avenues of human agency. Better we handle this kind of stuff on our own. Maybe it can start with,

“I think I will clean up my language and stop cussing.”

Maybe it is like when your mom took you by the ear to “help” you clean up your room by throwing out the apple cores and empty tins from under the bed and giving the greying sheets on the bed their annual wash.

“How can you live in this pig stye?”

Maybe, like Jordan Peterson says, we need to start by “making our beds”. Can we continue to live in this pig stye of a culture knowing that people are dying from its putrefaction?

Who knows.