Fanfare for the Commons

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A commons has a quality of just being there. Generally the rules for use are traditional and social, as opposed to formal and legalistic. This means, among other things, a happy scarcity of lawyers. People don’t need a contract in order to take a walk, a lease to sail in the ocean, an insurance policy to call a neighbor for help. They don’t pay royalties to use an apt expression or get a license to tell fairy tales to their kids. (That said, it will take new laws and lawyers to protect some commons, as opposed to operating them.)

Another attribute of a commons is an absence of advertising. The market economy is always pushing its 'goods' and 'services' in our faces. A commons, by contrast, is just there waiting to be used. Often it is discovered. If a swimming hole exists, people will find it. Social commons arise spontaneously—the city sidewalk that becomes a jump rope arena or vending bazaar, the old sofa in the vacant lot that becomes a ghetto equivalent of the village tree.

The commons is a prolific source of serendipity. It is not like the market economy, which is obsessed with a narrow spectrum of human concern—that is, the making of money—and tends to ignore problems that don’t appear on a corporate balance sheet. A commons, by contrast, engages people in a broader way, and produces multiple layers of positive effect. Open-source software such as Linux produces an informal network of collaborators who give their time and talents freely. A neighborhood park gives rise to communities of dog walkers, chess players, basketball players, parents with kids.

Culture thrives in a commons: Compare the menu in a Chinese restaurant—which draws freely from the culinary commons—with the one in a McDonald’s with its trademarked items. The English language is perhaps the ultimate commons, and it grows richer by the day as people, without recognition or compensation, add words and expressions.

The point here is not to romanticize the commons or suggest it should be everything. Markets do some things very well, as do governments. The point rather is the need for boundaries to prevent the market—and the government too—from drowning out the commons and its essential role in our lives.

Before we can reclaim the commons we have to remember how to see it. This is no small task because it has become invisible. The newspapers have many pages of stock market reports, but barely a word on the assets that belong to us all.

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