Kenneth Boulding

Kenneth Boulding, "Commons and Community: The Idea of a Public", ed. Garrett Hardin and John Baden, Managing the Commons, San Fransisco, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1977.

There are some very fundamental differences, however, between social and biological evolution. One is that biological individuals are biparental at most, whereas social artifacts are multiparental; hence the birth of social artifacts is directly involved with large numbers of other species. A horse can be produced by another horse and a mare; an automobile is produced by the interaction of designers, architects, engineers, corporations, trade unions, mines, ore ships, assembly line workers, salesmen, lawyers, politicians, and so on, and so on. [282]

Another very profound difference between biological and social systems is that in social systems human artifacts are made as a result of human decisions, which are very closely interrelated in human communities. Biologists call an ecosystem in a particular habitat a 'community', but the word is a metaphor and a very misleading one. The populations of a biological ecosystem are related by such things as predation, utilization of common food supplies, and physical niches. One species may help create a niche for another, but they are not in any strict sense a community. They have no government, and no individual member of the system has an image of the total system, only a very small fraction of it. Communities of human beings, because of their capacity for communication and shared images, have potentialities for conscious control which is not possessed by biological prehuman ecosystems [282]
[The kind of misconceptions of social evolution which must be addressed: purposefulness, conscious control, superior awareness & humans as the agents/replicators]

And ecological equilibrium, even when mathematically stable, is precarious and insecure, for there is always irresistible and irreversible change in the parameters of the system. For instance, we know very little about the sources of extinction. There are far more extinct species than extant ones. Species, like individuals, seem to have something like a life span, at the end of which their evolutionary potential is exhausted and they are displaced by species whose evolutionary potential is not yet exhausted. [283]

Malthus not only saw the great 'miserific vision' of the tragedy of the 'dismal theorem', as I have called it, but also had a very real answer to it, the trouble being that the answer is unacceptable. The answer is the segregation of misery through a class structure. This has been a very common answer in the history of the human race. If we privatize the commons, we will create an upper class who owns and administers it. It will be administered well. There will be no overgrazing. The boundary between the well-managed private property and the ill-managed public estate will stand out sharply as the famous irregular pentagon in the Sahel. Order and dignity will thrive in beautiful country houses, elegant gardens, productive farms within the boundary of class. Outside of this, the lower classes will breed themselves to egalitarian misery. If the upper class breeds too much it will chase out its youngest songs and unmarriageable daughters and will keep its population at the level at which it can enjoy per capita plenty. But outside the fence the lower class goes down to Hogarthian vice and misery. The pious and puritan middle class and upper working class may be admitted inside the territoriality fence and raise themselves above misery, restricting births, expelling the surplus, and catering to the rich, but there will always be the human cesspool of the poor, whose population is checked only by misery or vice. If the class structure can be preserved, if the fences hold through a combination of the threat system, the police and the military, and the opiates of religion, nationalism, and ideology, the system is pretty stable. [286]

We learn community as we learn everything else. It is a long and painful learning process. It begins in the hunting-gathering band. Everybody knows everybody and there is very general awareness of the nature and the resources of the community itself. Consequently, in spite of the fact that it operates usually in some sort of a commons, there is control of population, usually by infanticide, for everybody knows what the territory can support. The role of sacredness in the formation of communities, especially those of larger size, is an interesting and difficult question. Religion in some form seems to be universal in human culture, which makes one suspect that it is of great importance in the development of viable communities. Sacred sanctions that overcome the more self-centered images of individual interest might prevent the tragedy of the commons because of the community identity which the perception of sacredness creates in the individual. [287]

A very important dynamic in the building up of community is what I have called the 'sacrifice trap'. Once people are coerced, or even better, persuaded, into making sacrifices, their identity becomes bound up with the community organization for which the sacrifices were made. Admitting to one's self that one's sacrifices were in vain is a deep threat to the identity and is always sharply resisted. Martyrs create the legitimacy, identity, and community of the church; dead soldiers on the battlefield perform the same function for the national state, as innumerable war memorials testify. The sacrifices which parents make for children, or children for parents, bind them to each other much more powerfully than either love alone or hatred and fear alone could possibly do. The strongest communities, indeed, are those towards which we feel ambivalent. [288]

Where the boundaries of communities are not clearly defined and mutually accepted, the disputed space between communities becomes a commons which easily turns into a battlefield. War, indeed, is another example of the tragedy of the commons. In the absence of an overriding community, competing communities get into arms races and into conflict which is damaging to both sides. [288]

The effort to substitute ritual for actual fighting is a long-continued activity through human history. It results in the development of diplomacy, royal marriages, law courts, arbitration, ceremonies, treaties, all together comprising a very large range of human activity. As conflict becomes ritualized, the commons edges towards community. [289]

It may be, however, that ultimate sustainability is not possible, simply because of the exhaustion of what might be called 'social evolutionary potential' in any particular society or organization. It is strange how we take for granted that death is a universal law of living organisms and yet we deny this in the case of social organizations. [292]