by Garrett Hardin
Science 162:1243-1248,
The author is professor of
biology,
At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) 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 result 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 semipopular
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 not 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. My thesis is that the "population
problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class, How it
is conventionally conceived needs some comment. 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 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 now 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 do not know that it
is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that 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 (2). 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 (3), 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 (for example, 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
by "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 swimming 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 that 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. However, given an infinite source of energy, 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 (4). The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were,
reversed; but Bentham's goal is still unobtainable.
The optimum population is, then,
less than the 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; 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. Only a criterion of
judgment and a system of weighting are needed. 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 has 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.
However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on
earth today are (in general) the most miserable. This association (which need
not be invariable) 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 exorcize 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" (5).
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 optimum 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 (6) 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 (7):
"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, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability be
comes 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 one negative and one positive component.
1) The positive component 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) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created
by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by
all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decisionmaking
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 herd. 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 into 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 a
platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years
ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial (8). 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 approximate way, the logic
of 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, in constantly pressuring
federal authorities to increase head count to the point where overgrazing
produces erosion and weed dominance. Likewise, 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 "inexhaustible resources of the
oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to
extinction (9).
The National Parks present
another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present,
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 enter them. The allocation might be
on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the
basis 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 calculations of utility 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-enterprises.
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 by 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 adapt 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 10 miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near
enough to the truth when he was a boy for there were not too many people. But
as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling
processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
How To
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 (10). 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 by way of the photographic
shortcut. But the essence of an argument cannot be photographed: it 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. 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 burn trash in the back yard or to
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 custodes? "Who
shall watch the watchers themselves?'' John Adams said that 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-how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern.
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 (II). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them
for millenniums, at least.
If each human family were
dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents
starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its
own "punishment" to the germ line-then there would be no public
interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply
committed to the welfare state (12), and hence is 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 overbreeding
as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)? 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 30 nations agreed to the following (14):
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
the variety Homo progenitivus'' (16).
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 through 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 has serious
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: (i) (intended communication)
"If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like
a responsible citizen"; (ii) (the unintended communication) "If you
do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be
shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."
Everyman then is caught in what Bateson has called a "double bind." Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for
viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of
schizophrenia (17). 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 on 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 noncooperators.
For centuries it was 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, nor 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" (18).
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
that 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 (19); 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 (if not
the intention) of which 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 (20).
"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 by 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 laws 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.
It is one of the peculiarities
of the warfare between reform and the status quo 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 (21), 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: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) 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 produce evils. Once we are aware
that 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.
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 farm land 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 supersonic transport
which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast
to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television
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 (that is, 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 "freedom" 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.
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