Pirates Versus the Commons

Privateering Versus the Commons

An essay in Scientific American titled: The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons, debunks a seminal article that claimed that the obstacle to progress was “the tragedy of the commons” Unfortunately, as the article by By Matto Mildenberger on April 23, 2019 explains:

“The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong.” [Scientific American Article]

A Piratical World View

The problem is that Garrett Hardin was promoting a “libertarian,” “elitist,” and piratical world view. But it was influential in 1960. I remember studying it in school.

“Fifty years ago, University of California professor Garrett Hardin penned an influential essay in the journal Science. Hardin saw all humans as selfish herders: we worry that our neighbors’ cattle will graze the best grass. So, we send more of our cows out to consume that grass first. We take it first, before someone else steals our share. This creates a vicious cycle of environmental degradation that Hardin described as the “tragedy of the commons.”” [Scientific American Article]

The Commons

Except the concept of the commons is an idea of local control of people who agree not to over-graze cattle or misuse resources. It grows out of “salt of the earth” concepts that found their way into the writings of John Locke and other enlightenment writers in the 16th century. The concept of the commons are part of a whole series of basic bottom up English Countryside/peasant/commoner concepts:

1. . Common-wealth. [Locke]
2. . Common-sense.
3. . Common Decency.
4. . Common law.
5. . ordinary judges.
6. . Commoners.
7. . and yes, the commons.

The common sense Ideas of the Countryside and street

These ideas entered English, British politics after years of being the common sense observations and wisdom of the people of the European countryside. They were expressed as long ago as when Chaucer wrote his Canterbury tales between 1387 and 1400 and further back. Villagers and ordinary folks needed the commons to survive.

Over centuries peasants, beginning in the dark ages around the fall of the Roman Empire, tradesmen, farmers and townsmen extracted mutual arrangements, known as feudal arrangements. Their own leaders, in turn, had extracted feudal relationships and privileges from local and regional hierarchy. Feudalism was based on these relationships between a band leader and his captains and soldiers. It gave people rights as well as obligations.

Privateering

Rulers and ambitious people coveted land to own, divide among themselves and extract private taxes, land rents, from. The concept of commons was pitted against the notion that all land, all property from which economic rent can be extracted, should be privately owned and governed, by those superior beings (royalty and nobility) who could occupy and defend it. Even when land was ruled by feudal lords they sought to convert mutual obligations to one way obligations coupled with the right to extract land rents and obligations from their lieges and commoners. These lords usually began as brigands and pirates, and only over time could they call themselves “nobles.” This was an ideology of Privateering. Privateering as private, separate government, also meets the Lockean definition of tyranny.

A Dark Vision

Hardin's ideology was an ideology of privateering that looked with nostalgia on the dark ages.

“It's hard to overstate Hardin’s [twisted] impact on modern environmentalism. His views are taught across ecology, economics, political science and environmental studies. His essay remains an academic blockbuster, with almost 40,000 citations. It still gets republished in prominent environmental anthologies.” [Scientific American Article]

But his ideology was the economic royalism of British Royalty:

“But here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.” [Scientific American Article]

The ideology of privateering

Lifeboat ethics are Pirate Ethics

Privateers engaged in extraction have no interest in sustainability unless they can sustain production of loot and wealth for themselves. Even in the dark ages, often what started as a feudal grant became simple property or a separate country. This is not “lifeboat ethics” it is Pirate ethics. And Hardin when he

“promoted an idea he called “lifeboat ethics”: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water.” [Scientific American Article]

Was promoting an ideology of piracy. The ideology of privateering, is the pretense that private enterprise and ownership is always superior to "socialism", "common-property", or democracy. Privateers see themselves as nobility even when they come from common origins. And they see commoners as disposable and a hindrance.

The real tragedy of the Commons is the result of Privateering

Privateering is when something that doesn't have any right or justice to be owned privately, such as natures property or utilities, is nevertheless owned, managed and governed for private separate advantage. Privateers originally were pirates who had a letter of marquee that legitimized their private warfare, looting, theft, and other activities. For nobility, pirates and and privateers the commons are to be raided, conquered, stolen from, and then divvyed up turned into fiefs, estates, plantations or factories. If they can't become sources of power and wealth, then they were to be looted and abandoned. Privateers were lords and masters where they could sustain extraction and grifters and looters where they couldn't. If they couldn't extract value from people, they were disposable.

Thus the commons were always pitting against royalty and nobility. With nobility despising commoners, their claims to basic rights and privileges, and their assertion that some land did not belong exclusively to nobles or the crown alone. That is the real tragedy of the commons.

An Ideology of Privateering

Nobles sought to convert their grants of property into "allodial" property, free from feudal obligations to a superior. They also used raw power to extract rents and taxes from the people on their property. This led to efforts to reform feudalism. Unfortunately, in the early modern period, those lords converted their feudal arrangements involving mutual promises of support and obligation into simple property rights. Thus what were reforms that were sold as enabling commoners to own real property, led to dispossession and former feudal lords asserting the raw power to charge exorbitant land rents or evict the inhabitants to pay their own debts or put land to more extractive uses like sheep-herding. This was the tragedy of the commons and the basis of this was a privateering ideology and attitude. Hardin is an example of this ideology.

Pirate Ethics Fail

And like all pirates, who are at heart grifters, oligarchs, thieves and wanna be lords and masters, the reality is not with privateering cons...

“the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.” [Scientific American Article]

The reality is that private government is never superior to good government. Private government can be good government, but it rarely has effective checks and balances or limits on the power of the pirate captains it encourages to run public properties and exploit goods that would be better managed for the public good.

“Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions. This striking finding was the life’s work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (technically called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Using the tools of science—rather than the tools of hatred—Ostrom showed the diversity of institutions humans have created to manage our shared environment.” [Scientific American Article]

I wrote about Elinor Ostrom in November 2014, and her 8 principles of Managing A Commons [See Post]. Elinor Ostrom explained that the best way to manage a commons is with locally (the principle of subsidiarity) and collaboratively. People can restrain each other with far less violence than that required by the empowered bullies of economic or feudal “nobility”, e pluribus is far more powerful than “might makes rights” when people work together instead of in conflict.

“Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight. Hardin wasn’t making an informed scientific case. Instead, he was using concerns about environmental scarcity to justify racial discrimination.” [Scientific American Article]

Humans can manage finite resources indefinitely when those resources use sunlight, water and renewable resources plus human labor and productive capital, to produce the goods and services that mutually benefit everyone. We have seen that land productivity expands when people work the land with intelligence and mutual resourcing. Top down government fails as does anarchy. Both tend to be tyranny. Good government is collaborative. Neither socialism nor fascism nor feudalism or monarchy.

And I agree with the conclusion of the Scientific American Article:

“We must reject his pernicious ideas on both scientific and moral grounds. Environmental sustainability cannot exist without environmental justice. Are we really prepared to follow Hardin and say there are only so many lead pipes we can replace? Only so many bodies that should be protected from cancer-causing pollutants? Only so many children whose futures matter?” [Scientific American Article]

The arguments of so called "libertarians" is premised on the notion that "free-booting" is freedom. That animal behavior is the only sort of behavior available to humans. They have a despite against common-sense, virtue, and common-decency and that influences how they see the world around them. Commoners make a better check on these royalist and piratical impulses than any kind of royalty.

The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/?fbclid=IwAR0IyEnlFctFtAskddzPuS1L-CNDY4ovnjnzKKbhM3flvP_BcuVjd5_Oceo

Elinor Ostrom

https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/elinor-ostrom-and-her-8-principles-of.html

https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-principle-of-commons-was-magna.html