Tragedy of the Commons

[Steelhead]

Chris acts indignant, then hurls a litany of questions, about Garrett
Hardin and his relavence to anything Pynchonian:

>     But, whoa, Steely, what the HELL is this all about?
>
>     >Well, Chris, it's a Tragedy of the Commons. You _know_ that kind of
>     >tragedy don't you, Chris. That old Malthusian Garrett Hardin wrote
>     >all about it in that book, Spaceship Earth, where Mr. Hardin (who
>     >does a smashing imitation of Dr. Strangelove, don't you know) says we
>     >out to require abortions for most black pregnant folk. Or at least
>     >with-hold their food stamps and let them starve to death. Because the
>     >alternative is so much worse...worse for us, I mean, in the long run?
>
>     >Well, they--probably some black lady in marketing--started handing
>     >out the VV for free, mind you, FREE, and then it went to hell, the
>     >real talent jumped ship, and what passes for their editors (ex-MS.
>     >staffers) started askin' rank amateurs like me to scribble for it.
>     >Like I said, Tragedy of the fuckin' Commons, broh...
>
>     Steely, I'm so confounded by this that I hardly know what to write.
>     What are you saying, please?  I am unfamiliar with Spaceship Earth.
>     What is the Tragedy of the Commons?  You *are* being ironic here,
>     aren't you?
>
>     Or, are you saying that racism is implicit in my dis of the
>     dumbed-down Voice?  And/or, are you saying that a dis of you is
>     implicit in my dis of the Voice?  Gah!  Am I an idiot?  What the fuck?
>
>     You are likely being too subtle for me to "get" your intended meaning,
>     especially without knowing the allusion you've made, but clarify,
>     clarify, or I won't sleep tonight, goddammit.  (A-and, yes, duh, I
>     *am* familiar with Dr. Strangelove.  At least.)
>
>     Chris
>
>     (Ready to run off into Central Park like mad Sweeney)

Garrett Hardin, like his intellectual compatriots Edward Teller, Paul
Ehrlich and Freeman Dyson, haunts the SF Bay Area like some kind of mutant
laboratory rat...well a lab rat hobbling along on that certain type of
metallic crutches that attach themselves to the forearms. He's an
evolutionary ecologist, with a rather grim emphasis on population and
genetics (cf., The Nazi Doctors for a sampling of some of Mr. Hardin's
hero). Moreover, like many in this discipline, he is an unrepentant
Malthusian (Thomas Malthus 1766-1834, English economist, racist, and bane
of the Irish, who like many elites of his--and our--time was obsessed with
the coital and reproductive practices of the lower classes, fearing, quite
rightly, that their growing masses might one day wake up and topple the
landed gentry and aristocracy. The solution: population control through
forced starvation.), who believes we ought to be offering, for example,
Haitian women a trade of food and clothing in exchange for Norplant
implants or tubal ligations. He has also sidled forth his opinion that
retroactive abortions (ie., infanticide) might not be inhumane in certain
"overpopulated" regions of the world, such as Ghana or Zaire
or--presumably--South Central LA. A shot of sodium pen or brick to the
infant skull might be much more humane, Hardin argues, than a life of
starvation or the new roster of diseases, such as AIDS or the ebola and
Marburg viruses. In reality, of course, Hardin hardly gives a hoot whether
these unfortunate people die of state-sanctioned murder, starvation, or
bloody virsuses...as long as they die young, before they consume too many
resources that would be more profitably used by western elites.

Herr Doktor Hardin made his mark on humanity back in 1968 with an article
in Science magazine titled the Tragedy of the Commons. It was fairly dense,
loaded with dozens of equations, and synapse-numbing prose, but the article
set the scientific world a-twitter as no piece had since CP Snow's essay on
Two Cultures. Finally, after a thirty year hiatus it was safe to talk about
eugenics again--though in a highly coded language. Hardin's thesis was
quite simple, really. It goes like this. Any commonly-held resource, such
as a pasture, a forest, or a water supply, will eventually be exhausted
because all of the users of the resource have an incentive to maximum their
use. Since none of the users are immediately threatened by the degradation
of the resource, there is no incentive to restrain consumption. Factor in
spiralling populations and the natural resources of the planet are doomed.
This is the tragedy of the commons.

As his metaphor for explicating this theory, Hardin choose to examine the
enclosure movement in England that accompanied the breakdown of the
manorial system and the dislocation of the serfs and tenanted peasants who
had grazed livestock on common lands. The formerly fuedal lands were
privatized and fenced. The processed reached its peak in the late 17th
century. Hardin argues that the enclosure movement saved English grazing
lands from ultimate overuse. But then he turns his argument to look at the
fate of the few enclosed common grazing lands, where the huddled peasants
tried to graze their sheep and cattle, which of course ended up being
rapidly depleted. Another tragedy of the commons. Then Hardin suggests that
the entire planet is a commons that is being destroyed by "the freedom to
breed." Hardin says: "Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush,
each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in freedom
of the commons. Freedom of the commons brings ruin to all." Hardin's
solutions: enforced sterilization, mandatory abortions, and infanticide.

The modern environmental movement and leading feminists (ie, the
single-issue, abortion obsessed wing) made Hardin a hero. Ironically,
Hardin also became a shining star of the right wing free market types. The
marketeers argue--with Hardin's endorsement--that one solution to the
problem of the commons is to abolish all commonly held resources through
privitization. Private property rights, people like FV Hayek and John Baden
argue, create an incentive for owners not to irreparably destroy their own
resources. This argument has been advanced to rationalize privatized
ownership of the national parks, rivers, and, oddly enough, even the air.

Hardin turned this chilling nonsense into a weird SF book called, I think,
Spaceship Earth: New Ethics for Survival. His spaceship--not dramatically
different from some of Blicero's more morbid fantasies--was named the
Beagle. It was assigned to many biology classes back in the mid-70s.

Pynchon must have read this and must he have read it with revulsion. The
dangers of Hardin's theories pervade both GR and VL. Two years ago, Ken
Silverstein and I reported that in the course of his nefarious research
Hardin had accepted large grants from two unsavory foundations: the Laurel
Fund and the Pioneer Fund. These foundations are loaded with millions
courtesey of the wacko branch of the Mellon Family. These two foundations,
however, had also funded eugenics research projects in the past and had
actually employed former Nazi scientists brought to the US on the so-called
"rat-line."  Hardin was later forced to renounce the founding.

What does all this have to do with the VV, which has recently been handed
out for free in the NYC area? Simple. Since the paper is now free, it has
became a kind of literary commons that will--if you follow Hardinian
logic--ultimately degenerate into a smear of meaningless utterances.

Steely