Lecture #19:
Hardin: "The Tragedy of the
Commons"
THE
TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
by Garrett Hardin
At the end of a
thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Jerome Wiesner
and Herbert York concluded that: “Both
sides in the arms race are . . . confronted by the dilemma of steadily
increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment
that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for
solutions in the area of science and technology only, the results will be to
worsen the situation.
I would like to
focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a
nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is
no “technical solution” to the problem.
An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in
professional and semi-popular scientific journals is that the problem under
discussion has a “technical solution.” A
technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the
techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of
change in human values or ideas of morality.
In our day
(though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy it
takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York
exhibited this courage, publishing in a science journal they insisted that the
solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement
with the phrase, “It is our considered professional judgment. . . .” Whether they were right or not is the concern
of the present article. Rather, the
concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which
can be called “no technical solution problems” and more specifically, with the
identification and discussion of one of these.
It is easy to
show that the class is not a null class.
Recall the game of tick-tack-toe.
Consider the problem, “How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?” It is well known that I cannot, if I assume
(in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands
the game perfectly. Put another way,
there is no “technical solution” to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to
the word “win.” I can hit my opponent
over the head, or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I “win” involves, in some
sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the
game—refuse to play it. This is what
most adults do.)
The class of
“No technical solution problems” has members.
It is the thesis of the present article that the “population problem”
as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How is it
conventionally conceived needs some comment.
I think it is fair to say that most people who anguish over the
population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of
overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or
developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem—technologically. I shall try to show here that the solution
they seek cannot be found. The
population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the
problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
What Shall We Maximize?
Population, as
Malthus said, naturally tends to grow “geometrically”; or as we would say,
exponentially. In a finite world this
means that the per capita share of the world’s goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world?
A fair defense
can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we don’t
know that it isn’t. But, in terms of the
practical problems we must face in the next few generations with the
foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery
if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that
the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. “Space” is no escape.”
A finite
world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must
eventually equal zero. (The case of
perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need
not be discussed.) When this condition
is met, what will be the situation of mankind?
Specifically, can Bentham’s goal of “the greatest good for the greatest
number” be realized?
No—for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize
for two (or more) variables at the same time.
This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern, but the
principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating
back at least to D’Alembert (1717-1783).
The second
reason springs directly from biological facts.
To live, any organism must have a source of energy (e.g., food). This energy is utilized for two purposes:
mere maintenance, and work. For man,
maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day (“maintenance
calories”). Anything that he does over
and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported b y
“work calories,” which he takes in. Work
calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are
also required for all forms of enjoyment, from gormandizing and automobile
racing to playing music and writing poetry.
If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: we
must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as
possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations,
no sports, no music, no literature, no art. . . . I think everyone will grant,
without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize
goods. Bentham’s goal is impossible.
In reaching
this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of
energy that is the problem. The
appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. Given an infinite source of energy,
however, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is
replaced by the problem of its dissipation, as J.H. Fremlin
has so wittily shown. The arithmetic
signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham’s goal is still
unattainable.
The optimum
population is, then, less than a maximum.
The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know no
one has seriously tackled this problem.
Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely require more than
one generation of hard analytical work; and much persuasion.
We want the
maximum good per person; but what is “good”?
To one person it is wilderness—to another it is ski lodges for
thousands. To one it is estuaries to
nourish ducks for hunters to shoot at; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we
usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.
Theoretically,
this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. All that is needed is a criterion of judgment
and a system of weighting. In nature the
criterion is survival. Is it
better for a species to be small and hideable, or
large and powerful? Natural
selection commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural
weighting of the values of the variables.
Man must
imitate this process. There is no
doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made
explicit that the arguments begin. The
problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of
weighting. Synergistic
effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make
the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.
Has any
cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an
intuitive level? One simple fact proves
that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has,
and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that have intuitively identified
its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and
remains zero.
Of course, a
positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its
optimum. It is widely recognized,
however that, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations
on earth today are (in general) the most miserable. This association (which need not be in
variable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth
rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum.
We can make
little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly
exorcise the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations
(1776) popularized the “invisible hand,” the idea that an individual who
“intends only his own gain,” is, as it were, “led by an invisible hand to
promote . . . the public interest.” Adam
Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any
of his followers. But he contributed to
a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive
action based on rational analysis, namely the tendency to assume that decisions
reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire
society. If this assumption is correct
it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in
reproduction. If it is correct we can
assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the
optimal population. If the assumption is
not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are
defensible.
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons
The rebuttal to
the “invisible hand” in population control is to be found in a “scenario” first
sketched in a little known pamphlet in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named
William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We
may well call it “The Tragedy of the Commons,” using the word “tragedy”
as the philosopher Whitehead used it: “The
essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness.
It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” He then goes on to say: “This inevitableness
of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in
fact involve unhappiness. For it is only
by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.”
The tragedy
of the commons develops in this way.
Picture a pasture open to all. It
is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as
possible on the commons. Such an
arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal
wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below
the “carrying capacity” of the land.
Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, i.e., the day when the
long-desired social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the
commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational
being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less
consciously, he asks: “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to
my herd?” This utility has two components:
1. A positive component, which is a function of
the increment of one animal. Since the
herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the
positive utility is nearly +1.
2. A negative component,
which is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more
animal. But, since the effects of
overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any
particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of –1.
Adding together
the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only
sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his heard. And another; and another . . . But, this is the conclusion reached by each
and every rational herdsman sharing a commons.
Therein is the tragedy.
Each man is locked in to a system that compels him to increase his herd
without limit—in a world that is limited.
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own
best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Some would say
that this is platitudinous, that is, a truth known to all. Would that it were! In a sense it was learned thousands of years
ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from
his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a
part, suffers. Education can
counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable
succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be
constantly refreshed.
A simple
incident that occurred a few years ago in
In an
appropriate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time,
perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property
in real estate. But, it is understood
mostly only in special cases, which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing
national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent
understanding, constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the
head-count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and
weed-dominance. Similarly, the oceans of
the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the
commons. Maritime nations still respond
automatically to the shibboleth of the “freedom of the seas.” Professing to believe in the “inexhaustible
resources of the oceans,” they bring species after species of fish and whales
closer to extinction.
The National
Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the
commons. At present, they are open to
all, without limit. The Parks themselves
are limited in extent—there is only one
What shall we
do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private
property. We might keep them as public
property, but allocate the right to enter them.
The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, using an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined
by some agreed-upon standards. It might
be by lottery. Or, it might be on a
first-come, first-served basis, administered to long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable
possibilities. They are all
objectionable. But we must choose—or
acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.
Pollution
In a reverse
way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something
out of the commons, but of putting something in—sewage or chemical, radioactive
and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air; and
distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The utility calculations are much the same as
before. The rational man finds that his
share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the
cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are
locked into a system of “fouling our own nest,” so long as we behave only as
independent, rational, free-enterprisers.
The tragedy of
the commons as a food-basket is averted by private property, or something
formally like it. But the air and waters
surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a
cesspool must be prevented b y different means, by coercive laws or taxing
devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to
discharge them untreated. We have not
progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the
first. Indeed, our particular concept of
private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the
earth, favors pollution. The owner of a
factory on the bank of a stream—whose “property” extends to the middle of the
stream—often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural “right” to muddy
the waters flowing past his door. The
law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to mold
it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.
The pollution
problem is a consequence of population.
It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of
his waste. “Flowing water purifies
itself every ten miles,” my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near
enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there weren’t too many people. But, as population becomes denser, the
natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling
for a redefinition of property rights.
How Legislate Temperance?
Analysis of the
pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally
recognized principle of morality, namely:
the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at
the time it is performed. 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. A hundred and fifty years
ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his
dinner, and discard the rest of the animal.
He was not, in any important sense, being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left,
we would be appalled at such behavior.
In passing, it
is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a
photograph. One does not know whether a
man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others
until one knows the total system in which his act appears. “One picture is worth a thousand words,” said
an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to
reformers in general to try to persuade others via the photographic
shortcut. But, the guts of an argument
can’t be photographed: they must be presented rationally—in words.
That morality
is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics in the
past. “Thou shalt
not . . .” is the form of traditional ethical directives, which make no
allowance for particular circumstances.
(Christ did; and his continued existence was unbearable to the
Establishment.) The laws of our society
follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to
governing a complex, crowded, changeable world.
Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutory
law with administrative law. Since it is
practically impossible to spell out all the conditions under which it is safe
to b urn trash in the back yard or run an automobile without smog-control, by
law we delegate the details to bureaus.
The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient
reason: Quis
custodiet ipsos custodies?—“Who
shall watch the watchers themselves?”
John Adams said we must have “a government of laws and not men.” Bureau administrators, trying to evaluate the
morality of acts in the total system, are singularly liable to corruption,
producing a government by men, not laws.
Prohibition is
easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce!); but how do we legislate
temperance? Experience indicates that it
can be accomplished best through the mediation of administrative law. We limit possibilities unnecessarily if we
suppose that the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a
perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great challenge facing us now is to
invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed
authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.
Freedom to Breed is Intolerable
The tragedy of
the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle
of “dog eat dog”—if indeed there ever was such a world—it would not be a matter
of public concern how many children a family had. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave
fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately
for their children. David Lack and
others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the
fecundity of birds. But our society
is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence confronted with another
aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
In a welfare
state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class
(or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts over-breeding as
a policy to secure its own aggrandizement?
To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that
everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a
tragic course of action.
Unfortunately,
this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United
Nations. In late 1967 some thirty
nations agreed to the following:
The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of
society. It follows that any choice and
decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the
family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
It is painful
to have to deny categorically the validity of this “right”; denying it, one
feels as uncomfortable as a resident of
Conscience Is Self-eliminating
It is a mistake
to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an
appeal to conscience. Charles Galton
Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of
his grandfather’s great book. The
argument is straightforward and Darwinian.
People
vary. Confronted with appeals to limit
breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than
others. Those who have more children
will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more
susceptible consciences. The difference
will be accentuated, generation by generation.
In C.G. Darwin’s words:
“It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for
the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but
if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo
contracipiens would become extinct and would be
replaced by Homo progenitivus.”
The argument
assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is
hereditary—but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the
attitude is transmitted via germ cells, or exosomatically,
to use A.J. Lotka’s term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well
as the former, then what’s the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context
of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which
society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for
the general good—by means of his conscience.
To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works
toward the elimination of conscience from the race.
Pathogenic Effects of Conscience
The long-term
disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but it
has serious short-term disadvantages as well.
If we ask a man
who is exploiting a commons to desist “in the name of conscience,” what are we
saying to him? What does he hear—not
only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half
asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal
communication cues we gave him unawares?
Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously he senses that he has
received two communications, and that they are
contradictory:
1. (Intended
communication) “If you don’t do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not
acting like a responsible citizen.”
2. (The unintended
communication) “If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a
schlemiel, a sucker, a sap, who can be shamed into standing aside while the
rest of us exploit the commons.”
In
a word, he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He is caught in what Gregory Bateson has
called a “double bind.” Bateson and his
co-workers have made a plausible cause for viewing the double bind as an
important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia. The double bind may not always be so
damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is
applied. “A bad conscience,” said Nietzsche, “is a kind of illness.”
To conjure up a
conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend his control
beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the
highest level succumb to this temptation.
Has any President during the past generation failed to call upon labor
unions to moderate “voluntarily” their demands for higher wages, or to steel
companies to honor “voluntary” guidelines on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions is
designed to produce feelings of guilt in non-cooperators.
For centuries
it has assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an
indispensable, ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian world, we doubt
it. Paul Goodman speaks from the modern
point of view when he says:
No good has ever come from
feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, or
compassion. The guilty do not pay
attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests,
which might make sense, but to their anxieties.
One does not
have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences of anxiety. We in the western world are just emerging
from a dreadful two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros, which was sustained
partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the
anxiety-generating mechanisms of education.
Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers; it is
not a pretty one.
Since proof is
difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may sometimes, from
certain points of view, be desirable.
The larger question we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we
should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency of which (if not the
intention) is psychologically pathogenic.
We hear much talk these days of “responsible parenthood”; the coupled
words are incorporated into the titles of some organizations devoted to birth
control. Some people have proposed
massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation’s (or
the world’s) breeders. But what is the
meaning of the word “responsibility” in this context? Is it not merely a synonym for the word “conscience”? When we use the word “responsibility” in the
absence of substantial sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a
commons into acting against his own interest?
“Responsibility” is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro
quo. It is an attempt to get
something for nothing.
If the word
responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles
Frankel uses it. “Responsibility,” says
this philosopher, “is the product of definite social
arrangements.” Notice that Frankel calls
for social arrangements—not propaganda.
Mutual Coercion, Mutually Agreed Upon
The social
arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion,
of some sort. Consider
bank-robbing: The man who takes money
from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons.
How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal
appeal to his sense of responsibility.
Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel’s lead and insist that
a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will
keep it from becoming a commons. That we
thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret.
The morality of
bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete
prohibition of this activity. We are willing
to say “Thou shalt not rob banks,” without providing
for exceptions. But temperance also can
be created b y coercion. Taxing is a
good coercive device. To keep downtown
shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters
for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park
as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him
to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully
biased options are what we offer him.
Coercion is a
dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness
can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over
without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of
distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its
meaning. The only kind of coercion
I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the
people affected.
To
say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to
enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.
Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble
about them. But we accept compulsory
taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the
conscienceless. We institute and
(grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of
the commons.
An alternative
to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods,
the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled
with legal inheritance. Is this system
perfectly just? As a genetically trained
biologist, I deny that it is. It seems
to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal
possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance—that
those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power
should legally inherit more. But genetic
recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of “like father, like
son” implicit in our law as of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions and a trust
fund can keep his estate intact. We must
admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust—but
we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has
invented a better system. The
alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.
One of the
peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo is that it is
thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is
proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw
in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed
out, worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible
without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection
of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions:
1. That the status quo is
perfect; or
2. That the choice we
face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we
presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.
But we
can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of
years is also action. It also produces
evils. Once we are aware that the status
quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and
disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed
reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can
make a rational decision, which will not involve the unworkable assumption that
only perfect systems are tolerable.
The Recognition of Necessity
Perhaps the
simplest summary of this analysis of man’s population problems is this: the
commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low
population density. As the human
population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect
after another.
First, we
abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farmland and restricting
pastures and hunting and fishing areas.
These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.
Somewhat later
we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be
abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal
of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the western world; we are still struggling
to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide
sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.
In a still more
embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of
pleasure. There is almost no restriction
on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is assaulted with
“mindless music,” without its consent.
Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create the SST
plane, which will disturb fifty thousand people for every one person who is
whisked from coast to coast three hours faster.
Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and TV and pollute the view of
travelers. We are a long way from
outlawing the commons in matters of pleasure.
Is this because our puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as
something of a sin, and pain (i.e., the pollution of advertising) as the sign
of virtue?
Every new
enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal
liberty. Infringements made in the
distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that
we vigorously oppose: cries of “rights” and “freedoms” fill the air. But, what does “freedom” mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against
robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the
commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity
of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, “Freedom
is the recognition of necessity.”
The most
important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of
abandoning the commons in breeding. No
technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many
of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and “responsible
parenthood.” The temptation must be
resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the
disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in
the short.
The only way
we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by
relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of
necessity”—and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of
abandoning the freedom to breed.
Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
The End