Shoveled snow yesterday and today. I learned my lesson last winter: shoveling eight inches twice is a lot easier than shoveling sixteen inches once. I live in an apartment that’s the second floor of a house which has a diner-style restaurant and a flower shop on the first floor (the landlords run the flower shop), and so there’s the 15 x 25′ deck out back over top of the flower shop to shovel (if I don’t, water leaks down below), plus the back stairs down to the first floor deck, and the other stairs down from the kitchen, and then a path across the first-floor deck to the stairs down to the parking lot. Multiplying 15 x 25 by the roughly 1.3 feet of snow we got gives 487.5 cubic feet on the deck; let’s say each bite my one foot by two foot shovel took picked up about four inches (or two thirds of a cubic foot) and felt like about twenty pounds — that’s a lot of pounds of snow to have moved. I’m sure, of course, that it’s nothing to folks in Minnesota or Scandinavia or upstate New York, but I’m still glad I split it up, and I’m glad for my Matterhorns, which have served me well for the past eight years, and are the best cold-weather boots a person can buy, to my mind.
Anyway. So I was too beat last night to post, and today I’m still pretty tired too, with a piercing headache on top of it, but I ran into a couple articles about the Chicago practice of “saving” a parking space that one shovels out by placing lawn furniture in it. The practice has always struck me as unfortunate.
First, given that parking places are scarce in the city, claiming “dibs” by leaving a lawn chair in your space until you get home serves only to make spaces more scarce, not less scarce, and heightens the overall competitions for parking spaces. Second, the stupid pettiness of slashing someone’s tire, breaking an antenna, or making the idiotic threats Mario DiPaolo does (over a parking space!), attaches consequences to the act of parking in a space that is publicly owned: in other words, part of the commons. If Mario DiPaolo is so adamant about “owning” his parking space, one supposes that he might take on the responsibility for maintaining it: repairing potholes, paving, plowing, even enforcing such laws as speed limits (let’s hope he looks both ways before crossing the street). Yeah, shoveling’s hard work. Everybody has to do it. So why the foolish tendency to think that labor performed to maintain the commons makes a part of the commons into private property? (Disclosure: in my community, you’ll receive a $25 ticket if you don’t shovel the sidewalk in front of your house within 24 hours after a snowstorm. I think this is a good thing.)
Of course, Mario DiPaolo’s privileging of the “ownership” of the fruits of his labor over the collective good of the community (again: if nobody put out lawn furniture, there wouldn’t be as much of a parking problem, and no reason for the apparent acrimony over ownership in Chicago; what DiPaolo and others are doing is using their labor to rationalize stealing from the commons) is very much in line with our society’s “tendency” inherited from Adam Smith “to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society” that Garret Hardin problematizes in his 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons”. There’s a connection here between ownership and valuation that I’m trying to make, but I’m getting tired and my headache is getting worse, so I’ll just point to another couple of quotations from the essay that seem somehow important to me before going to bed. First, Hardin contends (emphasis his) that “the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed” and offers the example that “Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public; the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable”. This, to me, sounds a lot like the context-bound and relational understandings of class I’ve been trying to hammer out. Second, Hardin describes “any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good — by means of his conscience” as producing “a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race”. Perhaps, in Chicago and elsewhere, that’s how far we’ve come today.
Hmm… I’ve been working on stringing together some thoughts on learning communities and the academic commons, and Hardin’s quote about morality dovetails with some things I read in Lakoff’s Moral Politics. I recommend the book, Mike, particularly the first chapter or three where he talks about the metaphor of “moral arithmetic” and obligation it entails/connotes.
The Lakoff sounds interesting. I’ve been reading about exchange-based economies as opposed to reciprocity-based economies as opposed to gift economies, and how exchange is always haunted by the specter of enforcement — does that line up at all with Lakoff’s view of the right as more oriented towards authority and obedience?
The nutshell answer to your question is yes. I fear that I’ve got the beginnings of the killer crud myself, so I don’t trust my ability to precis what Lakoff is saying, but yes–conservatives in his conception live by a set of metaphors he names the “Strict Father Morality”. Reciprocity, obedience, an emphasis on self-discipline, denial of pleasure, and the like all grouped into a coherent view of both family and society.
I’m still trying to connect it all more explicitly with economy and exchange: is ownership and strict reciprocity consonant with the conservative worldview, and is copyleft and share-alike more in line with the “Nurturant Parent” model Lakoff describes? What’s the connection of all of this with ideas of the college/university as a locus of in-kind exchange, of an academic commons? I’m still pounding it out without much in the way of an Archimedean moment.
Hm. Not having read Lakoff, I’ll say that I can see how the metaphors might work, but when you ask what things are consonant with one another, I worry about piling too many metaphors atop one another. After all, reciprocity can be constructed both as generosity of spirit and also as adherence to exchange. There’s a continuum from “consevative” to “liberal” (and of course, even something as two-dimensional as the Political Compass shows us how reductive that continuum is), but is it elitist to wonder whether there’s also a continuum of political nuance?