October 28, 2004
IS IT THE DISTANCE OR THE PROXIMITY?:
Our dangerous distance between the private and the commons: Americans have retreated into cocoons of the like-minded where all they hear is echos of themselves. (Jonathan Rowe, 5/27/04, CS Monitor)
The concept of property early settlers had wasn't a walled fortress; it was a permeable membrane that sought to reconcile the parts and the whole. Early New Englanders built their towns around a commons, a shared pasture for livestock. Private woodlands were open to others for hunting or cutting wood, unless owners fenced them.Water law, so important in the new land, reflected this desire for balance. You could use the water that ran through your land, but not in a way that diminished your neighbor's use. The water belongs to all of us, the law said, and ownership has responsibilities as well as rights.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which laid out a plan of government for what is now much of the upper Midwest, declared that the main waterways there "shall be common highways and forever free."
Such thinking isn't a quaint relic of a simpler time. It's rooted in a fundamental economic truth - namely, the symbiosis between the private and the common.
Private property couldn't exist without a society that honors and protects it. The value of property derives largely from the efforts of others, or gifts of nature. Take a Park Avenue apartment, or a Cape Cod cottage, put it in a cornfield or urban slum, and you'd better reduce the asking price. The structure is the same; the difference is what's around it. The real estate mantra "location, location, location" really means "gifts, gifts, gifts" - of society and nature. This is true of financial assets as well as real estate. In fact, it's true to a degree of all human production and creation. Every invention, business technique, story, and song draws on what has come before. I couldn't write this, nor you read it, without the English language - a gift to both of us. We all stand on many shoulders; and earlier concepts of property acknowledged this.
Nowhere was this thinking more evident than in the realm of invention and ideas. America itself is an idea, the first nation so conceived; so the views of the Founders on this point are especially telling. Jefferson and Madison considered the mind to be the mother lode of freedom, and they wanted no restrictions - private or public - on its fruits. The copyright and patent clause of the Constitution generally restricts these private monopolies to limited times; and this provision is of a piece with the First Amendment protections of freedom of speech.
Benjamin Franklin was no slouch when it came to a dollar - yet he didn't seek patents for his numerous inventions. "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad to serve others by any invention of ours," he said.
There were contrary views, of course, and these soon gained the upper hand, being more congenial to moneyed interest. But the sense of affiliation with a whole persisted, in folkways as well as public policy. There were the frontier barn raisings and harvest bees in which work and time became a commons neighbors could draw from. There was the Main Street culture that combined the commercial with the social and civic. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held their famous debates at county fairgrounds and town squares throughout Illinois.
Democracy wasn't separate from the setting in which it occurred; and farmers and townspeople, many with little formal schooling, sat in the baking sun for hours to listen. [...]
We live...in suburbs conceived as staging areas for personal consumption rather than for social interaction. We move about in the hermetic enclosures of cars, shop in malls designed to exclude anything that might interfere with the buying mood.
We barricade our attention in electronic cocoons of iPods and cellphones. Family car trips once were occasions for storytelling that built a narrative bond between generations. Now kids sit in back and watch DVD's. Then we wonder why parents have trouble communicating with kids - why we feel lonely, isolated, and depressed.
Step by step, the paths through our "rice fields" have become walled corridors of one.
A reason for today's bitter, polarized politics is that people don't have to talk with those they don't agree with anymore. They just retreat into their cocoons of the like-minded where all they hear is echoes of themselves. They lose the capacity to tolerate - let alone listen to - anyone who thinks differently.
One wonders if the problem isn't precisely the opposite, that in an Information Age we're exposed to the ideas of others like never before and upon that exposure are made contemptuous of those we naturally disagree with. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 28, 2004 11:49 PM
OJ,
It could be both. Regardless, this is one of the best things you've posted, even if you disagree with it.
Specialization does wonders for our pocket books, but destroys (to some extent) our understanding of the world around us and (to some extent) our souls.
I'll take a great generalist over a cadre of specialists any day. We might get less done & make less money. But at least we will understand the world around us.
Posted by: BB at October 29, 2004 12:29 AMAfter spending 4 years talking w/Euro via this wonderful invention of Al Gore's, I have become contemptuous of them.
Posted by: Sandy P at October 29, 2004 1:35 AMIf society was as agreeable in the past as Rowe makes it out to be, no one would have emmigrated to America in the first place.
Posted by: John at October 29, 2004 2:22 AMBy all means. The Pauline Kael set would benefit enormously from escaping their cocoon, even temporarlily. For some reason, though, I doubt they're who the author had in mind.
Posted by: joe shropshire at October 29, 2004 2:31 AMOh, where do I start . . . perhaps with Indians attacking early settlements, or perhaps what it took to settle the Ohio River valley. Ah, never mind, where do these reporters get these ideas about early America? Perhaps from reading Rousseau?
Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at October 29, 2004 3:55 AMI agree with Orrin. It is a very interesting topic, and I addressed it at my blog, the Daily Duck.
Here's my comments:
I tend to agree with Orrin. In the supposed golden times that the author pines about, people had an intimate knowledge of maybe 50 people in their immediate community, and just about nothing of the vast rest of humanity. They lived in a cocoon of a different kind. Our cocoons are less spatially restricted, organized around work and interests. We create our own virtual cocoons, filtering our contacts through the identity templates we create for ourselves. This is normal and natural. People just cannot handle more than 50 or so meaningful, personal relationships with others. Personal relationships require a commitment of some part of ourselves, and we don't have that much of ourselves to pass around.
The problem we have today is that there are constant intrusions from the outside, barbarians at the gates, trying to break into our cocoons. Marketers trying to get into our skins. Political parties trying to earn our personal commitments. Religious missionaries trying to breach our identity barriers. Just plain nosy people trying to improve or manage our lives for us. The communications revolution has made these assaults more intrusive than ever before. We are now subject to the entreaties of strangers who may come from any corner of the globe, armed with personal information about ourselves that no earlier age would make accessible. It is a transactional, "hit and run" intimacy, a micro relationship that exists long enough to transact business or change a mind on some peripheral issue that we may know or care nothing about.
The virtual cocoons seems artificial and unnatural, which they are. The older cocoons were organic, natural. The intimacies that were engendered lasted lifetimes, and facilitated deep interpersonal transactions both economic, social and spiritual. We were once settled folk, now we are nomads. But our cocoon creation is a natural response to an unnatural environment. It is like a ship at sea, an artificial construct of dry land in a fluid wasteland. Some people never get used to its motions, and suffer a sense of "cocoon-sickness" that tells them something is not right. They look to the horizon for a point of land, a journey's end where they can disembark and live the settled life again. It is an island that no longer exists, a bucolic Atlantis sunk beneath the waves of modernity. Others , born and bred to know nothing else, feel at home in this floating virtual home, and would never turn their backs on the modern "sea" for the quaint stillness of such an ancient life.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at October 29, 2004 4:36 AM
Anyone who thinks that Americans are less tolerant and respectful of others' opinions than we were at some utopian point in the past is so far removed from reality that we can safely ignore him completely.
Posted by: Bart at October 29, 2004 6:19 AMBart:
Exactly.
OJ:
While I don't necessarily agree with "made contemptuous," your blog is a perfect counterexample to the article's argument. I have far more exposure now to divergent view points than before Al Gore invented the Web.
I just reread this article and it got my blood boiling again.
In reality, it's quite the opposite "of the like-minded where all they hear is echos of themselves."
Before Rush, Reagan and the internet, all we on the right heard on every side was views with which we diametrically disagreed. We had no mechanism with which to find each other, but now that information is no longer filtered through the leftwing media, we know that we are in the majority, and this election will show how much in the majority we are.
Just think of it. Even with the relentless barrage of lies, fantasies and distortions from the media, entertainment, academe, etc. conservatives have been able to sift through it all to learn the truth. It takes more time, but eventually the truth iis revealed.
It's the left that is incestuous. Many of them have never met or talked to someone whose politics differs from theirs. They can't believe that anyone with an IQ above room temperature can hold an opinion different from the received wisdom of the party line. You can believe I know what I'm talking about. I spent a lifetime in an academic environment.
Life with it denizens of the left. Your day is past.
The essay reminded me of Chesterton's remark that (foreign) travel narrows the mind.
Posted by: luciferous at October 29, 2004 10:27 AMA friend of mine, who grew up in a small town in Virginia, told me 30 years ago, long before the Internet, that cities and modern communciations had the effect of filtering heterodoxy.
His town had a village idiot, village athest, village drunk, etc., and growing up you had to deal with them. In the city, you can avoid them.
Not so long after he told me his theory, I read an interview with a woman in California who was a sort of naive Jainist (not that she knew anything about Jainism).
She said something about how her network of fellow believers around the country reinforced each others' faith, though some were not quite as strict as she was.
She, for example, did not believe in mowing lawns, because of the pain the grass feels when it is cut.
I can quote from memory her summary: 'Some of us do not believe the grass suffers, but I don't know anyone who doesn't believe the grasshoppers caught in the blades don't.'
Robert Duquette's comment gets my vote for Comment of the Month.
Harry, the strict Jainists in India, as you probably know, wear a facemask to avoid accidentally inhaling insects. They also carry a broom, to sweep a path in front of them so as to avoid stepping on critters.
I go to ridiculous lengths to chase spiders or flies out of doors...
Posted by: Eugene S. at October 30, 2004 7:54 AM