You are delving deeper and with more precision into geopolitics than anyone else I'm reading. FYI I am seeing Enclosurenomics play out and the local level back in Indiana, where, as you know, I'm from originally. The Governor, a Harvard MBA holder, owns the timber rights to tens of thousands of acres of forest and is working to decimate regulations by Forestry division of the state's Dept. of Natural Resources that prohibit clear cutting. When I last saw the Governor, and asked him what he did for recreation besides rabbit-hunting (a plain and simple sop to gun owners), he told me he liked to go hiking in the woods. It was not hard for me to imagine that he was putting mental price tags on all his timber, and adding up the millions he'd make if he could only chop it all down.
Too kind, there are many people who share with precision. I’m just synthesizing and labeling moving targets. What you’re describing in Indiana has become MBA status quo. Institutions, despite Ostrom emerging from your Alma mater, all instruct on Hardin. Is there a world in which a cliff is applied to asset holding? How much is too much? How much is enough? We keep wading back into the concept of Open Marxism, the one that is organic social evolution vs. the one that we cannot seem to get away from — the recursive, brute-force seize-and-capture model.
I'm really taken by how lucidly you identify and describe, in your series of essays (Gray Sheep, Worm in a Jar, Enclosurenomics), the gap between what we think we know and what there is to be known. We think we know what stealing is, for example. It may not occur to us that a common can be stolen, as distinct from "converted to more productive uses," until it does.
As a classicist, I've long been intrigued by *mentalités*. How can I, from the perspective of the 21st century, begin to understand certain features of an oral culture? Or lives that were so continuously and thoroughly governed by rituals? I don't know what I don't know.
By ranging over multiple disciplines, by analogizing from the concrete to the abstract, you help us see what was always there right in front of us. Well done.
A final quote, on the dynamics of commoning/enclosing and their relation to imperialism, colonialism, extractivism, etc., from Rabindranath Tagore in "Stray Birds": "The woodcutter's axe begged for its handle from the tree. The tree gave it."
You handed the essay back in a four-line rhyme. Then met the paradox of the commons with Tagore. I sailed an empty vessel in the waters of the mentalité to find the exquisite. Thank you.
Thank you. That’s very kind of you. Enclosing my work in a book is seductive, but just like the Hardin paper, how do you issue a correction to 35,000 citations (not to say I would get as many)? Substack is closer to a commonplace book. Editable. Cumulative. Governed by the readers who show up and bring Tagore. The argument stays alive because it has to. The territory keeps changing. So does the map. Now, this isn’t to say Substack won’t offer a ‘print book’ feature; these companies seem to find more ways to monetize with each cycle, but this would likely change the relationship with the work itself. You’ve given me something to ponder. Thank you :-)
I was fortunate to have survived aortic valve failure and replacement a couple years back. I was fortunate to have a life-long love of reading and to be in a community of folks who found and sent me reading material that was challenging, and therefore had months of enforced sitting back and reading everything brought me: McGilchrist, Kingsnorth, Piketty, Polanyi, Illich, Snyder. Hunter Thompson. And related to this remarkable piece of yours today, Gary Stevenson ("The Trading Game", '24), who just popped up on the web again today as well. I think, oddly, that you'd appreciate this economist in a track suit's take. (Here, 45 minutes: inequality, the looting of the Commons and war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI ). And all of this opened doors for my reading of your recent work.
Thank you for your discussion here of the Enclosure Acts and for the important addition (for me) of the Charter of the Forest. The fact that it was read aloud four times a year in churches in England caught my attention. I'm thinking of obtaining written copy and sending it on the the Diocese in which I reside as a catalyst for thought, since (like pretty much every Episcopal Diocese) there is a struggle to read the map of the indeterminate present with compass and sextant calibrated in 1952.
Thank you also for the lead to Elinor Ostrom and her work defining actual working Commons over time, like the pasture in Torbel. I'll be trolling the used book sites for something of her work. Also, for clarifying what Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" was actually striving to accomplish. And his eugenicist mindset. THAT didn't show up in the popular literature of the time about him.
It's astonishing to me the manner in which the clerics in Iran have set out briar patches and leg traps for the greed-besotted men here in the declining empire, and it appears they've stepped into every single snarl of brambles and trap set. And instead of stepping back to reflect, consider other points of view and ask wise others, they bluster ahead in ways that just further ensnarl them in their own hubris. We are all going to have our 'way of life' deeply challenged because of this.
Finally, this writing is of a piece with your work of the past months. So, thank you for this clarity. I hope you find the sort of plumber you'd recommend to your neighbors.
There is a specific quality of attention that comes from surviving something, a particular willingness to sit with difficulty, to let a thing cost what it actually costs, to read McGilchrist and Polanyi and the economist in a tracksuit (thank you for sharing!) with the same seriousness because you know what it means to have months of enforced stillness and the right books arriving. You brought that quality of attention here. I felt it.
The briar patch image is the one I'll carry. Br'er Rabbit knew the terrain. The trickster's advantage is never strength; it's the forty-six-year education in exactly which brambles will snare the adversary who mistakes confidence for knowledge. You arrived at the essay's argument through folklore, and the arrival is more precise than most theoretical framings I've encountered.
The Charter of the Forest to the Diocese — yes. Please do that. The fact that it was read aloud four times a year in churches is not a historical curiosity. It was a governance mechanism. The community of dependents on the commons, reminded four times yearly of their rights within it, constituted as a body that knows what it holds in common. Your Diocese struggling to read the present with instruments calibrated in 1952 is the Ptolemaic problem — not wrong instruments for their original moment, just not recalibrated for the displacement that has already occurred. The Charter is a recalibration. Send it.
Ostrom in used bookstores: Governing the Commons is the one. 1990. Cambridge University Press. It reads like fieldwork because it is fieldwork — she went and looked, which is the thing Hardin never did. The eugenicist frame didn't appear in the popular literature because it was inconvenient to the political project the paper served. The paper was useful. The man behind it was not examined. That asymmetry is itself a small lesson in how Enclosurenomics reproduces itself through selective citation.
And I found the plumber who will rule them all (well, at least in my neighborhood). The pipe that started all of this has been tamed; now we're on to months of restoration.
Thank you for reading your way back to life and finding this work on the other side of it. That is not a small thing. I am grateful you are here.
I am touched and appreciative of your thoughtful observations herein. Thank you. I'm ever more grateful to be here, and to be having such conversations.
I found Ostrom's "Governing the Commons" second-hand, and anticipate having it in the mail soon. In a review of her book by an economics journal of the era, the comments ranged from just dismissive to outright misogyny: essentially, '..how dare SHE question OUR knowledge of The Science of Economics with such political tripe!' Well, the understandings I've operated with for so many years turns out to be 'political tripe' of an equally spoilable character, too.
I may not be able to lead a movement like Ned Ludd, or even capture an audience like Paul Kingsnorth, or Timothy Snyder, but I can more clearly walk the walk of living and speaking in the manner of a monastic, separate from the world and not of it, but yet still in the world. And with compass and sextant recalibrated. The lead to Torbel's commons was like at last being able to have a plumb line to hold against all that is crooked. Thanks, again.
You are delving deeper and with more precision into geopolitics than anyone else I'm reading. FYI I am seeing Enclosurenomics play out and the local level back in Indiana, where, as you know, I'm from originally. The Governor, a Harvard MBA holder, owns the timber rights to tens of thousands of acres of forest and is working to decimate regulations by Forestry division of the state's Dept. of Natural Resources that prohibit clear cutting. When I last saw the Governor, and asked him what he did for recreation besides rabbit-hunting (a plain and simple sop to gun owners), he told me he liked to go hiking in the woods. It was not hard for me to imagine that he was putting mental price tags on all his timber, and adding up the millions he'd make if he could only chop it all down.
Too kind, there are many people who share with precision. I’m just synthesizing and labeling moving targets. What you’re describing in Indiana has become MBA status quo. Institutions, despite Ostrom emerging from your Alma mater, all instruct on Hardin. Is there a world in which a cliff is applied to asset holding? How much is too much? How much is enough? We keep wading back into the concept of Open Marxism, the one that is organic social evolution vs. the one that we cannot seem to get away from — the recursive, brute-force seize-and-capture model.
The fault is great in man or woman,
Who steals a goose from off a common;
But who can plead that man's excuse,
Who steals the common from the goose?
I'm really taken by how lucidly you identify and describe, in your series of essays (Gray Sheep, Worm in a Jar, Enclosurenomics), the gap between what we think we know and what there is to be known. We think we know what stealing is, for example. It may not occur to us that a common can be stolen, as distinct from "converted to more productive uses," until it does.
As a classicist, I've long been intrigued by *mentalités*. How can I, from the perspective of the 21st century, begin to understand certain features of an oral culture? Or lives that were so continuously and thoroughly governed by rituals? I don't know what I don't know.
By ranging over multiple disciplines, by analogizing from the concrete to the abstract, you help us see what was always there right in front of us. Well done.
A final quote, on the dynamics of commoning/enclosing and their relation to imperialism, colonialism, extractivism, etc., from Rabindranath Tagore in "Stray Birds": "The woodcutter's axe begged for its handle from the tree. The tree gave it."
You handed the essay back in a four-line rhyme. Then met the paradox of the commons with Tagore. I sailed an empty vessel in the waters of the mentalité to find the exquisite. Thank you.
You should write a book on something. I'd read it.
Thank you. That’s very kind of you. Enclosing my work in a book is seductive, but just like the Hardin paper, how do you issue a correction to 35,000 citations (not to say I would get as many)? Substack is closer to a commonplace book. Editable. Cumulative. Governed by the readers who show up and bring Tagore. The argument stays alive because it has to. The territory keeps changing. So does the map. Now, this isn’t to say Substack won’t offer a ‘print book’ feature; these companies seem to find more ways to monetize with each cycle, but this would likely change the relationship with the work itself. You’ve given me something to ponder. Thank you :-)
Beautiful mind, thank you deeply.
The forest, finding itself.
Slack-jawed here, again, ma'am.
I was fortunate to have survived aortic valve failure and replacement a couple years back. I was fortunate to have a life-long love of reading and to be in a community of folks who found and sent me reading material that was challenging, and therefore had months of enforced sitting back and reading everything brought me: McGilchrist, Kingsnorth, Piketty, Polanyi, Illich, Snyder. Hunter Thompson. And related to this remarkable piece of yours today, Gary Stevenson ("The Trading Game", '24), who just popped up on the web again today as well. I think, oddly, that you'd appreciate this economist in a track suit's take. (Here, 45 minutes: inequality, the looting of the Commons and war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi265I48MdI ). And all of this opened doors for my reading of your recent work.
Thank you for your discussion here of the Enclosure Acts and for the important addition (for me) of the Charter of the Forest. The fact that it was read aloud four times a year in churches in England caught my attention. I'm thinking of obtaining written copy and sending it on the the Diocese in which I reside as a catalyst for thought, since (like pretty much every Episcopal Diocese) there is a struggle to read the map of the indeterminate present with compass and sextant calibrated in 1952.
Thank you also for the lead to Elinor Ostrom and her work defining actual working Commons over time, like the pasture in Torbel. I'll be trolling the used book sites for something of her work. Also, for clarifying what Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" was actually striving to accomplish. And his eugenicist mindset. THAT didn't show up in the popular literature of the time about him.
It's astonishing to me the manner in which the clerics in Iran have set out briar patches and leg traps for the greed-besotted men here in the declining empire, and it appears they've stepped into every single snarl of brambles and trap set. And instead of stepping back to reflect, consider other points of view and ask wise others, they bluster ahead in ways that just further ensnarl them in their own hubris. We are all going to have our 'way of life' deeply challenged because of this.
Finally, this writing is of a piece with your work of the past months. So, thank you for this clarity. I hope you find the sort of plumber you'd recommend to your neighbors.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15
There is a specific quality of attention that comes from surviving something, a particular willingness to sit with difficulty, to let a thing cost what it actually costs, to read McGilchrist and Polanyi and the economist in a tracksuit (thank you for sharing!) with the same seriousness because you know what it means to have months of enforced stillness and the right books arriving. You brought that quality of attention here. I felt it.
The briar patch image is the one I'll carry. Br'er Rabbit knew the terrain. The trickster's advantage is never strength; it's the forty-six-year education in exactly which brambles will snare the adversary who mistakes confidence for knowledge. You arrived at the essay's argument through folklore, and the arrival is more precise than most theoretical framings I've encountered.
The Charter of the Forest to the Diocese — yes. Please do that. The fact that it was read aloud four times a year in churches is not a historical curiosity. It was a governance mechanism. The community of dependents on the commons, reminded four times yearly of their rights within it, constituted as a body that knows what it holds in common. Your Diocese struggling to read the present with instruments calibrated in 1952 is the Ptolemaic problem — not wrong instruments for their original moment, just not recalibrated for the displacement that has already occurred. The Charter is a recalibration. Send it.
Ostrom in used bookstores: Governing the Commons is the one. 1990. Cambridge University Press. It reads like fieldwork because it is fieldwork — she went and looked, which is the thing Hardin never did. The eugenicist frame didn't appear in the popular literature because it was inconvenient to the political project the paper served. The paper was useful. The man behind it was not examined. That asymmetry is itself a small lesson in how Enclosurenomics reproduces itself through selective citation.
And I found the plumber who will rule them all (well, at least in my neighborhood). The pipe that started all of this has been tamed; now we're on to months of restoration.
Thank you for reading your way back to life and finding this work on the other side of it. That is not a small thing. I am grateful you are here.
I am touched and appreciative of your thoughtful observations herein. Thank you. I'm ever more grateful to be here, and to be having such conversations.
I found Ostrom's "Governing the Commons" second-hand, and anticipate having it in the mail soon. In a review of her book by an economics journal of the era, the comments ranged from just dismissive to outright misogyny: essentially, '..how dare SHE question OUR knowledge of The Science of Economics with such political tripe!' Well, the understandings I've operated with for so many years turns out to be 'political tripe' of an equally spoilable character, too.
I may not be able to lead a movement like Ned Ludd, or even capture an audience like Paul Kingsnorth, or Timothy Snyder, but I can more clearly walk the walk of living and speaking in the manner of a monastic, separate from the world and not of it, but yet still in the world. And with compass and sextant recalibrated. The lead to Torbel's commons was like at last being able to have a plumb line to hold against all that is crooked. Thanks, again.
Tim Long