10th anniversary post: The tragedy of the commons (life)

Litter is a plague on our cities

(4/1/2026) Ten years ago this month, I wrote about a fellow who used the grassy median on our street as his dog's toilet. "Neither the man nor his dog cleans up afterwards," I noted. It served as a homely example of Garret Hardin's belief that people had incentives to over-use common property, such as a village green for grazing sheep, or a grassy median on Blake Boulevard. Hardin believed, though, that people could be educated to the existence of common and long-term interests, enough to change their behavior. Back in 2016, I was, to say the least, impatient at the pace of that enlightenment:

I can't speak for other cultures, but our culture has a strong individualistic strain with a vocabulary to match. Daily advertisers pitch convenience to us as if it were an absolute good, while an oil company offers us "a full tank of freedom." We have yet to develop an equivalent vocabulary to talk about community, or a way to discuss balancing individual and community interests. This needs to happen soon if we're going to live together in this world.

In March, Addison Del Maestro published an essay in The Deleted Scenes in which he responded to another essay by Chris Arnade. Arnade argues that Americans of good heart are forced into private spaces because public spaces in the U.S. are so disordered. He traces this to America's distinctively individualistic culture: 

The U.S. has a different model that emphasizes individuality over the communal, with our thick culture focused not on being a good citizen first, but finding our true self and exploring that, and hopefully making a lot of money along the way--Koreans are citizens, we are entrepreneurs. That is one of our greatest strengths, and has served us well economically and artistically.... Yet a result of the American model is a wider distribution of behavior, including fatter extremes, with a far larger amount of people prone to antisocial tendencies... If our elevated levels of addiction and mental illness are consequences of our culture of individuality, as I believe they are, then we have a moral responsibility to take them off the streets and care for them--for those broken by our celebration of freedom... and more importantly for the working people navigating around them. (Arnade 2026)

Addison Del Maestro,
blogger at The Deleted Scenes

Addison Del Maestro, while mostly agreeing with Arnade, is concerned that too much emphasis on public order makes public places "blandly conformist."

When we visited Japan, I liked how orderly and polite everything was, but it also felt a bit... oppressive. There really is a part of the American in me that would rather have a disorderly public sphere than have my right to behave disruptively constrained. Now, I don't behave disruptively, I just kind of find it emotionally claustrophobic to be somewhere I can't if I wanted to.... And I think I prefer the American you-do-you approach, where you feel like nobody's really watching or keeping tabs, over the conformist approach of a place like Japan. (You can't even take photographs in stores; everything feels very ritualized and rule-bound, and I chafe against the more than I appreciate the calm and order it brings.) (Del Maestro and NickS (WA) 2026)

Del Maestro concludes this piece by quoting an extended commentary on his position by a third Substacker, NickS (WA). Nick is glad he doesn't have to fear being beaten up for being "visibly weird," but wonders if our tolerance should extend as much as it does to, say, loud motorcycle engines. For my part, from earliest memory I have been obsessed with rule following--can't really say why without extensive psychotherapy, but maybe my spindly physique has something to do with it--but I want to be able to disobey rules when they don't make sense, like crossing streets in the middle of the block when there are no cars around. At the same time, I would like to see less ungoverned reckless driving, sexual harassment, bullying, loud noises, littering, &c.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830)

By coincidence, my Political Philosophy class recently read an essay on liberty by the French politician Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) called "Ancient and Modern Liberty." In 1819, Constant described modern liberty as rooted in individual autonomy. In large societies with complex economies, he explained, the social influence of most people, even those with multiple forms of privilege, approaches zero, because your one voice amounts to a tiny fraction of the whole society. So the most you can hope for is maximizing autonomy over your own life, while the government is likely to be constrained by the high cost of controlling a large number of people.

In ancient times, by contrast, the small communities on the knife-edge of existence had a lot of incentive to stick together and work together. (Consider the micromanaging style of the ancient Israelite laws detailed in the first five books of the Bible.) Ancient liberty allowed individuals a lot of voice in community decisions, said Constant, but once the decision was made everyone had to abide by it. Solidarity and conformity were seen as vital to the existence of the group, constantly threatened by famine and disease and external attacks. Constant concluded that ancient liberty, with its stress on connections between everyone, has its attractive qualities, but attempts to reintroduce it in modern society would be bound to fail, for both logistical and cultural reasons.

Back to modern times and modern liberty: Richard Florida and colleagues have argued for years that an "open culture premium" was a significant part of the phenomenon of rising property values associated with higher proportions of GLBTQ+ and artistic types (cf. Florida and Mellander 2007). A community open enough to tolerate nonconforming expressions, it seems, is open enough to encourage the sorts of innovation that create wealth (pp. 9-10). Recent research by the Brookings Institution finds a similarly positive relationship between immigration levels and metro economic performance (Haskins and Parilla 2026). These make a strong case for the existence of a general community interest in the broadest possible reach of modern liberty. Maximum freedom generates maximum good ideas, which in turn generate community wealth. (Note the enormous proportion of American gross domestic product (GDP) that occurs in counties that support Democratic presidential candidates.) On the other end of the spectrum, the current campaign against a 30-year-old Islamic school in Homewood, Alabama, (Draper 2026) does not speak well for that community's future participation in the global economy.

Beyond a reasonable point, rules don't produce order. They produce anxiety, and stifle creativity. They are expensive and labor-intensive to enforce. They produce pretexts for cracking down on unpopular groups, like immigrants, especially under the current administration. "Libertarianism for me, authoritarianism for you" is a pretty common running through Project 2025, the blueprint for much of what the current administration has been doing, both its raft of deportations and its raft of pardons.

So we're not authoritarians here. At the same time, though, individual freedom only works if it is tempered by a sense of being part of something greater than yourself: a community, if you will, an ongoing project that you joined some time ago and, that will continue long after you're gone, and which has some power to obligate you to other-regarding behavior. We don't have to be Japan or Korea, but we have a lot to do to make our public spaces scenes of collective joy. That is probably another post.

ORIGINAL POST: "The Tragedy of the Commons (Life)," 21 April 2016