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You are here: Home / Archives for Jedediah Purdy

Our Work Includes Repairing the Commons of Public Life

June 21, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m somewhere between anger and resignation, sadness and fear these days because the quality of almost every “public good” that we share as Americans seems to be declining in quality faster than the public’s servants can process erosions like these, let alone address them.

By the public’s servants, I’m not talking about government workers whose jobs are to maintain and improve our communities. No, it’s the members of our communities—the folks that JFK had in mind when he observed: “Ask not what your country can do for you.” The rest of us also have personal stakes in the quality of the streets we walk on, the governments we elect, the markets that build our wealth, and the political debates we have with one another. These days, fewer of us seem to be bearing those responsibilities, and those who continue to do so can easilly despair given the extent of the challenge.

No bureaucracy will ever be large enough to do the work of a public that no longer feels these stakes or finds them too daunting to bear.

There are many examples of course, but I’m thinking this morning about the the kinds of quality-of-life “crimes” that riled a New York City Police Commissioner 25 years ago, and that persist to this day just outside my door. 

For almost my entire life, I’ve lived, worked or gone to school a few blocks from Route One. Both proximity and congestion on this Maine-to-Florida roadway always had me thinking about the public (and semi-public) spaces that we’ve carved out for ourselves along the expanse of it. It’s also let me observe the sad path from neglect to disrepair of these shared spaces, with self-interest (and its debris) trumping the public’s interest at nearly every turn. 

For instance, almost daily I see its casual evidence on the grassy strip between sidewalk and street in front of my house.

I live one-house-down from a small intersection and traffic light, which has come to mean a daily tide of discarded water bottles, fast food wrappers, and similar rubbish washing up on my strip of green from the stream of passers-by. Since my neighbor at the corner rarely picks up her yard, the downward sweep of traffic also brings much of “her” litter my way before too long. During the pandemic, when I complained on this page about regularly picking up discarded underwear, used Kleenex and rubber gloves, one of you gifted me with a trash-picker so I no longer had to think about touching it.

My much-maligned strip is a semi-public space. The City owns the trees, the energy and communications providers their rights-of-way. Anyone is free to stop or park along the curb. For all that public access, I get to mow the grass and maintain “our curb appeal.” Driver and pedestrian disregard has always been an irritant, but over the past 20 years the mess that’s left in their wake has become a daily chore.

Jedediah Purdy foresaw these quality-of-life and broader erosions of our public goods in 1999’s For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today.  In the course of his provocative book, he describes what he means as “the commons of public life” from two different angles. On the one hand, it consists of: 

“the things that affect us all, and [that] we can only preserve or neglect together. In the end, they cannot be had alone.” 

But at the same time, it is: 

[a] good deal of what we value most, whether openly or in silence, meaning…the things we cannot avoid having in common, and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all.

The commons is a roadside or park. It is a communications medium like the internet or the evening news. In a democracy like ours, it is the gears of governance and decision-making. We hold such things “in common,” Purdy argues, whether we acknowledge our ownership and our responsibilities as owners or not.

He also mentions what ecologist Garrett Hardin once called “the tragedy of the commons” or the consequence of the public’s exercising freedoms that come with common ownership but not their responsibilities. 

According to Hardin, self-interest often causes those with access to the commons to take as much as possible, such as overgrazing or clearing forests, before others [who are similarly motivated] can do the same….  What is taken is not renewed, and soon the commons are exhausted….[But] the laws of self-interest that move Hardin’s analysis are not laws at all.  Instead, the tragedy is a cultural and ethical event.  It takes place only when we join self-interest with mutual indifference.

How do we rise to our common duties? Purdy’s response:  “Just by living in the world, just by caring for things, we take on a responsibility for the world’s well-being.” 

Will our care be enough to over-come the tragedies that degrade it? His response is much the same: “The question is not whether to hope” that our common things will be maintained, repaired or even improved “but whether to acknowledge our hope, to make it our own.” 

The common areas around trees on the Upper East Side of New York and somewhat less grandly (but more accessibly) a few streets over in my neighborhood.

Where the commons are concerned, things always come to a head when there is not enough of a common good that people prize. Such is the case with “green space” in cities like New York or Philadelphia, and for my interest in a recent Times article called “In the Fight Over N.Y.C. Sidewalks, Tree Beds Are the Smallest Frontier.” (Here’s a paywall-free link.) When the surface-level green on a street is as small as its tree-beds, who gets to decide how this shared and common space gets used?

Street trees provide shade in the summer and lower ambient temperatures while producing oxygen and absorbing CO2 year-round, so the Parks Department (which has jurisdiction for maintaining New York City’s) has been enlarging tree beds to allow roots to spread and to drink in more storm water. Formerly no more than 5 by 5 feet in size, they now can be 5 or even 10 feet longer. That means these tree-centered areas have been expanding. As of today:

Over 660,000 trees line the streets of New York City, and the beds around them take up more than 400 acres, according to a city estimate. While many people just walk by the rectangular openings in the sidewalk from which the trees spring — or, worse, use the spaces as trash cans— others lay claim, unofficially, to these pocket-size patches of land for their own uses.

“As the weather warms, these caretakers swing into action.

“They plant flowers, post signs to ward off dog owners, and fashion fences from broomsticks, linoleum tiles and old skateboards. Some create mini memorials to departed loved ones.

“It all makes sense. In a concrete jungle where few residents have yards, the tiny parcels offer New Yorkers a rare chance to dig into the soil, connect with nature and make something beautiful grow.

Moreover, weekend gardeners (and their admirers) aren’t to only ones who want to benefit from these common spaces. Tree advocates argue that barriers about tree beds block rain from flowing off the sidewalk and reaching the tree’s roots, while placing too much soil in a concrete or brick “container” around a tree’s trunk can cause the bark to rot and lead to disease. 

Not surprisingly, dog owners have their own perspectives. The Times article mentions that a local dog owner ripped out a picket fence that had been erected around a tree bed “to make it easier for his dog to do its business,” noting (with some satisfaction) that he was “hauled into court” shortly thereafter. The writer also observes how “[p]ooch pee and poop, it must be said, can harm plants, not to mention create hazards for those who work the soil.”

But having spent time with a dog in New York, I was often at a loss while searching for the necessary bare (though fragrant) ground that Rudy (at the time) or other City dogs would find appealing during walks. Maintenance and improvement of common areas amidst the concrete could also dictate tree-free but open stretches that dog owners (in turn) might maintain, including the relatively-modest provision of poop bags to all comers, a can to dispose of the waste, and an arrangement with the Parks Department to empty them regularly.

When users become owners–transforming the hope that these common places will be maintained and repaired into their hope–it’s possible for competing needs to be accommodated, for the beneficial sharing of common resources to become a reality, and for communities to strengthen. 

Wild flowers that I noticed somebody had planted in a West Philadelphia median strip, maybe as their own expression of hope for this public space.

As I write this post, I notice that today’s newspaper includes two more stories where public neglect and private self-interest have been sullying—more than any dog could—other features of the American commons. One story was about a cheating scandal affecting a Little League baseball team in suburban Washington D.C. where the player’s prominent and powerful parents may have had more of an incentive to see their kids win than was good for anyone concerned. 

Another story involves the misuse of America’s financial markets to raise billions of dollars for a politically-connected company with little track record, deep losses and principals who have utilized the public stock offering process unsuccessfully before. Marketing this so-called “meme stock” seeks profit with no fundamentals and, while technically legal, makes a mockery out of performance-based attempts to secure public financing though stock offerings on a national exchange. At a time when the U.S. economy’s success is the envy of the world, its guardians (like my bosses at the SEC) should be far more aggressive than they’ve been in deterring questionable use of the public-offering process.

Neither of these stories recounts “somebody else’s problems.” Little League baseball and the nation’s stock markets—along with the hopes that we invest in them—belong to us all. 

Unfortunately, instead of re-claiming this hope too many of us (including me) fall into resignation and withdrawal from public life because the challenges facing the commons I benefit from too can feel overwhelming. 

The antidote is reclaiming our ownership over the parts of our public lives that are most important to us, perhaps starting with the most proximate ones. If it’s trash between the sidewalk and street in front of your house, then clean it up as part of your gratitude for living in a beautiful neighborhood that you hope will remain beautiful, and stop grousing about it. (There may also comfort in the fact that clean sidewalks invite less future trash than already littered ones.)

Is it the use of tree-beds on City streets? The quality of the conversations on social media? Opposing bias and propaganda in the local news. Whatever it is, we can put our stakes down and clarify (at least to ourselves) why we’ve done so in this valued part of our public lives. 

It could transform our dread about an impoverished future into something that includes (in our actions) a small engine of hope about the repairs we’ve begun. 

+ + +

On a related note, I briefly profiled an excellent New Yorker essay called “The Theft of the Commons” in an earlier post. Among other things, its arguments have implications for currently unclaimed parts of the oceans, the Arctic and Antarctic, and nearly every aspect of outer space. 

This post was adapted from my March 24, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts Tagged With: commons of public life, Garrett Hardin, Jedediah Purdy, median strips, Rt One corridor, shared use and responsibility, sidewalks, street trees, theft of the commons, tragedy of the commons

It’s Time To Envision a Better Future

August 5, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

At a time of year when everyone around me seems to be slowing down, I’ve been ramping up to envision the kind of fall and winter that I want to have.

On the writing front, I’ll be seeking a publishing deal, but first I have to finish two projects.

My book alternates between arguments about finding good work and free-standing but related short stories that consider jobs, values and motivations from more personal perspectives. I’ve almost finished writing the story that ends the last chapter. My arguments are already fleshed out. With both in mind, I can turn to writing the submission package that will sell the book.

There’ll be a gratifying sense of completion when I finish these preliminaries, but also a point of departure. As I finish these projects, I’m also be envisioning the future that I want next–which is to bring out a book that can reach the audience it’s intended for.

The picture above speaks to me about this kind of “looking forward.” It’s one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s watercolors, painted when he was first envisioning the world of “The Hobbit.” (It, along with other of his visualizations for that book, is currently on view at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.) As a storyteller, Tolkien used watercolors like this to help him “see” what he’d soon be writing about.

His image projects a sense of order, calm and beauty onto a Middle Earth that would soon be challenged by evil forces. It’s a utopian view of the future that tells you what you’ll be fighting for when the battle is joined. For my book, I’m creating a hopeful vision that can help me to counter the stress and rejection that are likely ahead of me. And last but hardly least, Tolkien’s watercolor also recalls how little optimism there is in our collective envisioning today. We can all see dystopian futures ahead, but too few of us can see better ones.

What is it about our time that makes it so difficult to envision a better future for ourselves, for our children, and for their children? Why is there so little optimism today, and who can help us to find a measure of hope?

John Seely Brown, whose vision I tried to capture here last week, is not the only one who is cautiously optimistic in the face of a future that is hurtling at us faster than we can process it. But before introducing Jed Purdy’s ethics and field of vision, a few more words about the deficits of hope and attention that need to be confronted before we can look into the future with any confidence.

One Perspective on Today’s Pessimism

Espen Hammer, who teaches philosophy at Temple University, has been thinking about “utopias” or “visions of a better world” recently, and why they’re playing almost no role in our conversations with one another today.

He reminds us that debating the futures we’d like to see has always driven progress before, “providing direction and a sense of purpose to struggles for social change and emancipation.” But after reviewing the impact of this process through history, Hammer notes in a recent New York Times essay that optimistic debate about the future that we want for ourselves has largely ground to a halt.

Today, the utopian impulse seems almost extinguished. The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behavior. The utopias of technology are less impressive than ever now that — after Hiroshima and Chernobyl — we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

In other words, Hammer is less optimistic than Brown when it comes to “utopias of technology” and has no hope at all for “utopias of justice.” Instead his imagination is clouded by “the two fundamental dystopias of our time: those of ecological collapse and thermonuclear warfare.”

It’s a bleak prognosis.

The only glimmer of hope that Hammer can identify is found in “nature, and the relationship that we have to it.”  But instead of envisioning a better relationship with the natural world, all Hammer can say is that “we desperately need to conceive of alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.”

Is our hope today really this desperate and uncertain?

A Tipping Point

Unlike Professor Hammer, I think we’re at more of a tipping point when it comes to the possibilities of technology, justice and humanity’s co-existence with nature.

We’re at a point where individuals with bold utopian visions—together with those who believe in them—can tip the balance in favor of a better future. But many of us-most of us-nearly all of us are either oblivious or like deer frozen in the headlights. Far too often, it’s been my story too. But our clouded future merits a more active response, particularly when individual willpower can still make a difference. Unfortunately, I can always find reasons to explain away my failures to act.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything More Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My Self-Worth Is So Tied To My Politics That I Can’t Escape the Circus of It For Long Enough To Envision a Better Tomorrow

The widening political divide is another trap. The vision we have of our ideal selves—for example, what we believe about freedom or social justice—is so caught up in the political logjam that we are increasingly unable to solve shared problems with anyone who has “conflicting” values or to summon up the vision that real solutions require.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

Of course, these “reasons” are also “excuses” that my willpower can overcome. So I write as much for myself as this newsletter about individuals who face the same personal shortcomings and dystopian futures that I do but can still manage to act with something like hope:

-how dissenters like Edward Snowden share a vision of the future they believe in, invite others to join it, and, by doing so, enable everyone involved in the debate to clarify their own commitments (6/3/18 and 6/10/18 newsletters);

-how Martin Luther King framed the world that he wanted to live in, and how when facing our own moral choices about the future we can ask ourselves: “If MLK would be on the other side of where I happen to be on this question-why?” (4/15/18); and

-how German philosopher Jurgen Moltmann attempted to find a glimmer of Christian hope in the ashes of Nazi Germany by grappling with the crucifixion as well as the resurrection (7/23/18).

The internal and external challenges to a hopeful future are daunting, but so are the consequences when we remain on the sidelines because of our cluelessness, future shock, inertia, lack of information and deficits of courage.

The Future of the Anthropocene

Jed Purdy is a Duke law professor who also teaches at the school’s Kenan School of Ethics. In writings that culminated in “After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene” (2015), Purdy defined the “age of humanity” when humanity became a force, perhaps the dominant force, in shaping the planet. In an interview when his book was published, Purdy said ours is an age “when there is no more ‘nature’ that’s independent of human activity.”

Because the fates of nature and humanity are interdependent today, Purdy argues that the future of the world “is an unavoidable political question” and that “world-making” going forward is “a collective project, like it or not.” He elaborates on one way that this kind of political problem-solving can play out:

Because the economy is, in a sense, what produces ecological reality under Anthropocene conditions, this means the economy, too, has to be a political problem. Instead of absorbing ecology into the existing economy, we should think about [other] possible economies in relation to the possible ecologies we’d like to inhabit.

In other words, instead of using “nature” simply to fuel our economic wellbeing, we should consider the kind of “natural world” that we want to live in as an essential part of the political debate. “Nature” has value to us separate and apart from its economic utility in the discussion that we need to have. If we fail to honor this critical distinction, Purdy fears that “nature” will continue to be degraded if not destroyed altogether.

For Purdy, it’s a question of ethics, and of expanding our priorities, because:

what people believe and value, how they see the world, can enable them to organize and act politically in ways that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, otherwise. Imagination frames problems and changes the boundaries of possible response.

But for the political exchange between humanity’s (economic) and nature’s (ecological) priorities to be vibrant enough, we also need to expand the framework of what we value beyond our economic well-being, complimenting our material priorities with our non-material ones–much as economist/philosopher Amartya Sen has also argued. (Sen’s thinking was briefly discussed here on 5/6/18.) By way of example for the political debate that he has in mind, Purdy recommends:

what the Romantic social movement around the early Sierra Club did, or what certain aspects of the food movement are doing now. Start with something that was regarded as a burden or a bad thing—deserted and unfruitful high mountains, [local farm] labor in the dirt—and turn it into a source of satisfaction, build new kinds of community and identity around those, and feed them back into the political system as demands to create the infrastructure that makes those newly valued ways of living possible.

It would produce a richer array of priorities and, at least potentially, the kind of political exchange that could strike a more productive accommodation between nature and humanity in the Anthropocene.

While Purdy is as disgusted as anyone with the current state of political discourse, because political decision-making on a broad enough scale is the only mechanism that’s available to build a better future, he won’t give up on politics. Still, Purdy’s hope that we’ll be able to come together in a political framework for the sake of the world is both narrow and cautious.

Currently, there are no institutions, movements, or even feelings of commonality that could support acting on the scale of climate change…[but] I’m not prepared to say we should treat our contingently broken and incapable politics as if it were some kind of intrinsic ethical constraint.

His vision for a natural world we want to live in may seem “utopian”—or pie in the sky—but Purdy and others are struggling mightily to see the future in broad enough terms that healthier more sustainable ways forward can be proposed, debated by the world’s stakeholders, and acted upon before the challenges ahead become even more daunting.

I keep coming back to this quote from the end of the equally tumultuous 19thCentury when Oscar Wilde was struggling to envision a better future.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.

With whatever optimism and focus we can muster, I keep telling myself that each one of us has a role to play in envisioning–and making–that better world.

See you next Sunday.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: dystopia, envision, envisioning, ethics, future, Jedediah Purdy, motivation, optimism, Tolkien, utopia, utopias, values

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