Yves here. KLG, drawing on the ideas of Elinor Olstrom, argues that the thinking that got us into our current mess, particularly but not solely climate climate change and environmental degradation, is inherently ill-suited to come up with remedies.
While heterodox ideas and experiments are our only hope, in my usual devil’s advocate manner, I believe the nature of the problem is more severe than Olstrom (and KLG, inspired by her) believes. What we are up against is not just neoliberalism. It is a highly complex society, with most occupying very specialized roles, combined with capitalism, which requires a large majority of people to sell their labor to survive. Oh, and worse, sell that labor in a competitive market. That generally means that trying to do things differently as a current or prospective employee is likely to result in not having a paycheck.
Individuals are typically subject to multiple sets of responsibilities, and they often conflict. The number of conflicts tends to increase as societies become more complex, starting with family/tribal, local communities, national, global. Humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility. The tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex. As the great philosopher, Jamie Lannister, said:
So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.
Nearly everyone will put family/tribal first. In a capitalist system, that means taking steps that might threaten your job or worst make you permanently unemployable are anathema. So living in a “good” suburb so as to provide for a decent level of education for your kids implies all sorts of other things, like owning a car or two for a working spouse so as to commute, take said kids to various events and play dates (or even pick them up from school), and provision for the family, are perceived necessities that lock most people into participating in high energy consuming lifestyles. It is hard to see how many, even if they wanted to, can shift away from that.
In other words, we do need new thinking and approaches. But “heterodox” may be too polite to signal the radicalism needed.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health
Heterodox, from the OED: Not in accordance with established doctrines or opinions, or those generally recognized as right or “orthodox.” The past two centuries of orthodoxy have led us to our current pass, where at least half the people may be poor in the so-called Global North and more than half are poor in much of the Global South, our environment is severely damaged, and climate catastrophe is no longer beyond the horizon. Something else will be required to retrieve the situation as best we can. Received “wisdom” will not be the answer.
But the orthodox, thoroughly neoliberal interlocutor will ask, “Can your solutions really work?” (1) My reply is usually, “It is scarcely imaginable they will do worse.” And besides, the world is heterogeneous, i.e., composed of diverse elements or constituents; consisting of parts of different kinds (OED). Our world is granular and polymorphic in all things biological, physical, social, cultural, and political. But orthodox politics and economics have little room for diversity, much less place. Under the current Neoliberal Dispensation one place is necessarily the same as another even though all places are distinct. This is at the root of our present difficulties. If we (all of us) are to survive, we must learn the importance of place, and in the words of Wendell Berry and Christopher Alexander we must solve for place and for pattern.
This can be done from the ground up, but only if the straitjacket of Neoliberalism is dissolved. We have the heterodox leaders who can lead the way. Previously in this series we discussed the environmental economist Herman Daly (1938-2022) who was viewed as unacceptably heterodox when he placed the “economy” firmly within the ecosphere, which will not support semi-infinite growth of anything material. A justifiably infamous economist, then at the World Bank, responded to Daly’s true but heterodox thesis with “That is not the way to look at it!” This vignette is recounted in Beyond Growth (1996), which is still in print and as current now as it was 28 years ago.
Another heterodox problem solver is Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) who was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2009 for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” Elinor Ostrom is the first, and after the recent Nobel announcements, still the only woman to win this prize. (2) If we are to survive and possibly thrive in the coming world, Elinor Ostrom has much to teach us. What follows is not a list of what must be done. These remain unknown. But how we should proceed is clear if we are serious.
Elinor Ostrom is an excellent place to start. She began her work on the commons in opposition to the well-known essay by Garrett Hardin that appeared in Science in 1968: The Tragedy of the Commons (pdf). This tragedy was inevitable for Hardin, who later wrote another famous essay entitled Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor (pdf) that has been published in several collections since. Hardin was not incorrect in his view that population growth could exceed the carrying capacity of the ecosphere, but his approach was tiresomely conventional, cramped, and misanthropic in the extreme. It foreshadowed the Neoliberal Dispensation which began in earnest not long after his famous essay during the single Presidential term of Jimmy Carter.
Hardin’s work was not sui generis. He was apparently quite the traditional “conservative” by the standards of his day, including his assent to the utter nonsense that was The Bell Curve later in his career. His perspective dovetails with two other influential documents produced just after The Tragedy of the Commons. The first is the article from the New York Times Magazine on 13 September 1970 by Milton Friedman: A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. This virtual throwaway became the prime justification for the marketization of virtually everything in the name of corporate profit, very narrowly defined. This “Friedman Doctrine” remains current because Milton Friedman was extraordinarily influential both inside and outside his academic home as a member of the Chicago School (14 “Nobel” laureates and counting). He also wrote a regular column in Newsweek from 1966 through 1984, when Time and Newsweek were the two essential American newsweeklies with circulation in the millions.
The second document is the Powell Memorandum (23 August 1971) entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System (pdf, 23 August 1971), written for the United States Chamber of Commerce by Lewis Powell, then a Virginia corporate lawyer for Big Tobacco and later an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. There is nothing surprising in Powell’s reaction to the 1960s, nor the utility of his eponymous memo in autochthonous emergence of conservative reaction in think tanks, including Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council, and Manhattan Institute. Each is dedicated to preserving the “American Way of Life.” Hardin, Friedman, Powell, and their friends have had far-reaching influence that continues.
Elinor Ostrom responded. What made her heterodox – the radical with conservative tendencies to the extent that she appreciated the Public Choice Theory (3) of James Buchanan – was that she always called herself a political economist instead of an economist. Indeed, there is no economics without politics, something often left unappreciated by the profession, especially in how it is taught to undergraduates in the business schools of our colleges and universities. It was possible to major in Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences in my day, but I never came across that person. Ostrom’s research across many different problems showed that the collapse of the commons was not due to human cupidity or some innate flaw in human nature.
On the other hand, trust is the key to a thriving commons of any kind – pasture, woodland, water, fisheries, air, and extending the concept, healthy food, healthy social and political organization, and healthcare. Trust has often been problematic for many at the margins of society, but today trust is almost completely lacking for “bad and sufficient reason” among the many, who are inevitably commoners. In direct conflict with Hardin, Ostrom also found, along with others (4), that “enclosing the commons” by whatever mechanism, has often been a common antecedent of their failure. It is not an accident that enclosure in England was a natural, classical Lockean action to make land productive as a capital asset rather than remain a sustainable resource for commoners. The line is not straight from enclosure to Neoliberalism, but the thread is there, as cultural attributes such as equality, grassroots democracy, and peaceful cooperation were subsumed by the market that operated at an increasing remove from commoners.
To return to the commons for commoners, the solutions to our multiple cascading crises must be found using a polycentric approach that requires citizens to act at every level from the individual to the community and through the regions and countries in which our local communities are embedded. The solution to these problems must also be polycentric. Ostrom did not neglect institutions while concentrating on the commons. In a diverse and granular world, no one solution (e.g., The Market) will solve every problem. Rather local society and overarching institutions that mediate different processes are essential. Anthropogenic global warming cannot be solved by individuals, but Roger Scruton was not wrong in his view that small local solutions are the place to begin. From Ostrom’s “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100, 3: 641-672 Quoted in Derek Wall, p. 58:
The most important lesson…is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more complex social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. (5) Designing institutions to force…entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been a major goal of (public policy) for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants , and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.
Yes, and none of these desired outcomes are possible under the Neoliberal Dispensation. A sustainable commons for the commoners (the 90%, at least) requires Deep Democracy, which was another primary problem addressed by Ostrom. Deep Democracy requires that people shape their lives rather than electing a small minority to legislate their lives for them. Deep Democracy has no connection to the Our Democracy™ of today’s Professional Managerial Class (PMC), but it will be essential if we are to learn to thrive again in local communities, i.e., where we live, breathe, and eat. In a democratic, humane society, this can be done. Conventional politics has now answer. It is only a Manichean fight for status between advocates of suspect notions of good and evil that politics has become over the past fifty years, especially in the Uniparty of the United State. How do we get there? The floor is open to all.
What is clear throughout the work of Elinor Ostrom is that “what we need is at hand.” I first came across this expression in the work of Harland Hubbard, artist and homesteader at Payne Hollow on the Ohio River in Kentucky. We cannot all live like Anna and Harlan Hubbard, nor should we. But we can live as Anna and Harlan as independent, free, thoughtful, humane beings who are at one with a world of multiple integrated commons for commoners. We cannot do this without trust, and as Derek Wall puts it very well:
The commons fail, ultimately because distrust leads to a lack of cooperation. Without trust and cooperation, we are doomed. Elinor Ostrom “did not believe that human beings were either basically cooperative or inevitably selfish…She was instead interested in how trust and cooperation could be nurtured to overcome the commons dilemma and similar problems.
Trust is local at its origin and expands outward, from where it should be reciprocated by institutions. (6) Reciprocity is now severed from both directions. Once again the floor is open for discussion followed by good work.
What may be most important in the work that Elinor Ostrom left us is that she did what every good scientist, artist, writer, and clinician does. She identified problems and searched for solutions. This is the scientific method, such as it has been best described by the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright and her collaborators: What works to produce useful knowledge is more important than what is true according to theory. (7) Elinor Ostrom worked in her Ostrom Workshop, which continues to extend her vision. A Workshop is the perfect mechanism for producing useful knowledge. A workshop allows for transdisciplinary approaches to polycentric problems. (8) This best work also requires the Deep Democracy contributed by non-disciplinary contributions from citizens. One major thread through the work of Elinor Ostrom is that academics on every field do not have the only answers, as noted by Derek Wall (p. 88):
(Ostrom’s) approach was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so, to have good ideas about solving this problem that outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack. This is a straightforward elitist view of knowledge production…Ordinary people…lack knowledge (while) academics (who) make up an intellectual elite and government officials can use the expertise of academics to implement solutions.
Regarding the intellectual elite, not hardly, as they say in these parts. All of us – scientist, academic, bureaucrat, and citizen alike – operate from The Way of Ignorance, which can only be dispelled in a vibrant workshop that includes many voices and perspectives and is thoroughly integrated into the living world.
One criticism from the Left (neglecting what the Left really is) has been that Elinor Ostrom cannot be placed there. While this is true in a broader sense, it is intelligible only to those who have not been paying attention. Neither Left nor Right, and certainly not the Center, has an exclusive grasp on the truth of anything. The world, especially as we approach the Inconvenient Apocalypse brought on by our effective unreason, is too large for one truth, from wherever it comes.
Heterodox analyses of our problems are not new. Nearly one hundred years ago members of another workshop (9) understood where we were headed. They were conservatives opposed when not ignored by the Chapel Hill Liberals associated with Howard Odum and most of the rest of the intellectuals of their day – the incipient PMC. The conservatives could write the following though, and their perspicacity endures:
Industrialism is the economic organization of American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical…(and has)…enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists…take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either.
The amenities of life also suffer under the curse of a strictly-business or industrial civilization. They consist of such practices as manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love – in the social exchanges which reveal and develop sensibility in human affairs. If religion and the arts are founded on right relations of man-to-nature, these are founded on right relations of man-to-man.
In conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find a way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.
Add oblivion to impotence. Thus wrote the soldier, poet, philosopher, literary critic, and teacher John Crowe Ransomin the “Introduction: Statement of Principles” to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Alter the English usage at the margin to please modern ears and change a few terms (e.g., industrialism to Neoliberalism) and the diagnosis is as valid today as it was in 1930.
The world will get smaller whether we want it too, or not, and soon. Unless we – all of us, including the billionaires with their fever dreams of bolt holes in New Zealand – relearn the arts and sciences of managing our various commons for commoners, the future will be grim in every way that makes life humane. The heterodox among us will necessarily lead the way, one commons, one community, and one region at a time. Elinor Ostrom, Herman Daly, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, and even the Nashville Agrarians of one hundred years ago, have much to teach us if we are willing to learn. Our current PMC in its unthinking certitude, not so much.
Notes
(1) To repeat myself: Neoliberalism holds that “The ‘Market’ is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.” This is a simple but useful working definition. Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown is the best single analysis of Neoliberalism I have read.
(2) I have been reading individual works of Elinor Ostrom for years, but the outline of what follows is based in large part on Elinor Ostrom: Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States (2017) by Derek Wall, which I found serendipitously in a sale email from Pluto Press. This is a highly recommended and readable account of Ostrom’s work for the most part. But Wall might disagree with himself now on the benign utility of the Internet and the long-term future of Uber.
(3) Public Choice Theory, according to Tyler Cowan and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University – the font of academic libertarianism, goes back to the wit and wisdom of John C. Calhoun of Fort Hill. The internal logic leading to formal justification of a system has no relationship to the effect(s), good or ill, the system has on the world.
(4) For example: R. Netting, Balancing on an Alp, Cambridge, 1981, where Netting found documentation of management of the mountain commons dating back 800 years to 1224.
(5) Or, Homo economicus does not exist except in modern economic theory and the works of Ayn Rand.
(6) As Wendell Berry has noted of his humane world that is Port William, in the local economy and culture someone can be trusted to be unreliable. This is important knowledge lost in our larger, mostly inhumane economy and often relearned only at great expense.
(7) This remains largely unrecognized by the “economic sciences” and several others. For an outstanding rant about the state of modern physics, see the inimitable and indispensable Sabine Hossenfelder here. Parallels between modern physics and modern economics are unmistakable. Ditto for much of Biomedicine. For how biomedical science has become Biomedicine, mostly due to neoliberalization that was made possible by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, there are several previous contributions to this series. A definitive treatment by Philip Morowski is reviewed here.
(8) I have been fortunate. The laboratories I have worked in have been workshops with scientists, technicians, and students bringing complementary expertise to interrelated questions that addressed important problems. One of those led to a discovery that revolutionized cell biology, quite by accident, while we were studying how certain sea creatures are nearly 100% efficient at transferring energy in the form of blue light from one protein to another protein that emits green light (from blue to green is energetically downhill).
(9) The professional Southerners (e.g., neo-Confederates and their ill-tempered ilk) who use the Agrarians as a prop to support their anachronistic and illegitimate views are as inevitable as fleas on a farm dog or a barn cat during a Southern summer. They are to be ignored, steadfastly.
