WEEK SEVEN: NO TIME TO SAVE THE WORLD

Reading Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” I remembered the spirit of global concern that was in the air when I was a kid in the ‘60s. You heard a lot of talk back then about the problems of overpopulation, pollution, nuclear winter, etc. And a lot of people took it very seriously. I remember vowing, when I was about twelve, that I would never pollute the air by owning a car. If I had to ride a horse to get around, I would ride a horse.

I never did get a horse. I owned a car for a while but finally traded it in for a bicycle about fourteen years ago. I recycle, I compost, I conserve electricity, I mow my lawn with a push mower, I don’t eat meat, I try to support local organic farmers, but on the whole I consider myself just about as selfish and lazy and hedonistic as the average American.

My sister took the spirit of the ’60s more seriously than I did. She did a lot of protesting at a nuclear power plant and spent time in jail for it. Then she bought some land in upstate New York and became a veritable Thoreau, living with her dogs in a yurt and hauling water from a well while she painstakingly built a house for herself by hand. Today she’s a nurse and public health administrator, living in a New Hampshire village with her husband who is a nurse practitioner. They are two of the most fun people I know, but when I told them recently how much I enjoyed a trip to Las Vegas, they remarked that they would never go to a place like that because of all the water and electricity it wastes. They have principles.

Today people who took the spirit of the ‘60s seriously are laughing stocks. Damn hippie, tofu-eating do-gooders. The tide of anger and outrage that swelled up around Vietnam and Watergate swept the progressive movement forward in mainstream America through the ‘70s, when it was actually fashionable to care about the world. Then cocaine and the Reagan conservatives brought a new “morning in America” when people woke up, rubbed their eyes and asked themselves, “What was that nightmare I had? Sheez, let’s stop worrying and have some fun! Time to think about ME! Time to party!”

That party is still going on today, not only in America. Globalization has spread a freewheeling, free-market spirit of “more for me NOW!” to almost every corner of the globe. We still read articles and see television stories that warn us of impending perils, but our knee-jerk reaction today is to make jokes about them. Whoever came up with the idea, back in the ‘80s, of the bumpersticker that read “Nuke the Whales” knew exactly where our consciousness was heading.

Hardin’s article is even more depressing to read today that it would have been in 1968, if you think about how much worse the problems he talks about have gotten. In this age of high tech it is startling to read Hardin’s statement that there are no technological solutions to our problems. In this age of Information Revolution it is depressing to read Hardin’s prediction that even spreading information cannot stem the tide of our problems. Most depressing of all is his prediction that voluntary temperance and good behavior not only will not solve our problems but may actually make them worse, by making it easier for others to be intemperate and behave badly. As Hardin says, it only makes sense to grab what you can. Letting your neighbor grab it instead, because of your idealistic notions of doing good for the world, is perverse.

The implications of Hardin's arguments are pretty clear. If things keep going the way they are (and they will), the only possible ways to prevent disaster are political. As population grows bigger and the world, by comparison, grows smaller, we must realize that the earth itself is our “commons” just as the pasture in the middle of a New England village was a commons shared by all inhabitants. If we are to solve the problems of the use of this world commons by political means, the political power to do this must be some kind of world government.

The idea of world government is a pretty scary concept in itself, but it may be inevitable, just as giving up many of our cherished freedoms may be inevitable. Let’s hope we can find a path toward world government that will preserve as many freedoms as possible. Let’s hope we develop a world government that embraces the best aspects of democracy, socialism and free enterprise. Certainly the establishment of the United Nations was a step in the right direction. We must support and strengthen this institution, instead of bypassing it and deriding it as “irrelevant” as the Bush Administration and their ambassador John Bolton have done.

We laugh today at the people who thought that the telegraph, or the telephone or television, would bring world peace and brotherhood and sisterhood. Despite this, I believe that if the Internet can be maintained as a “commons” for free and candid communication throughout the world, it can be a powerful vehicle for bringing about progressive, non-oppressive political solutions to global problems.