I have done a lot of thinking on the subject of the "commons" recently in the context of looking at the meaning of rights, legal terms, from outside the legal system. I guess what started me on this was various economic musings such as this one that I discussed in a post to Buddhist_Dialogue Group:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/buddhist_dialogue_group/message/37204
The article:
http://www.econlib.org/library/ENC/TragedyoftheCommons.html, It is a good idea to read this article and this one from Wikipedia before reading what I have to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons:
"In England and Wales, a common (or common land) is a piece of land over which other people—often neighbouring landowners—could exercise one of a number of traditional rights, such as allowing their cattle to graze upon it. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the word "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to."
And later:
"The fact that land is common land does not mean it has no owner—all land in England and Wales is owned by someone. Those who have a right to exercise a right of common are known as commoners. Historically most rights of common were "appurtenant" to particular plots of land. So the commoner would be the person who, for the time being, was the owner of the land. Some rights of common were said to be "in gross" in that they were unconnected with ownership or tenure of land. This was more usual in regions where commons were more extensive, such as in Northern England or in the Fens but also included many village greens across England and Wales."
The reason this is important is that understanding the general concept of the commons is that the concept itself has been abused by partisan ideologues in their efforts to befuddle us commoners about our rights as citizens in the US. Untangling the linguistic and conceptual befuddlements is important or we are in danger of loosing our common rights to inequitably distributed private property and the tyranny of the wealthy and connected.
In the Wikipedia article they detail examples:
common pasture (right to pasture cattle, horses, sheep or other animals on the common land)
common piscary (the right to fish)
common turbary (the right to take sods of turf)
estovers (the right to take sufficient wood for the commoner's house or agriculture)
The issue of the commons is "how do communities divide up the properties (spaces, material and things) of those communities in a fair fashion." In a society where everything is owned by wealthy or "noble" individuals this is an issue of the potential tyranny of those people against the "commoners" who have no other way to exercise necessary freedoms such as the need to provide fuel, clothing, food, or keep their animals alive. The commons represents a contractual arrangement between "commoners" and owners that allows the liberties of both groups to be "adjudicated" or settled in a manner that is (aimed at being) agreeable to all parties.
This notion of "commons" has been used to analyze environmental-economic situations that are very different from those of Europe, but the underlying principle is important to understand: Ownership of certain kinds of property can only be assigned if the rights of people to use those properties can also be divided agreeably. Common pasture, piscary and turbary estovers deal with the rights of commoners to enter public space that may be privately held and to assert their liberties in situations where otherwise those rights would be denied with disagreeable consequences.
Why? The common folk had to assert their right to "common land" because just as it is important that each of us have our own liberty -- which requires either control or outright ownership of our own "space", so some spaces need access by people as commons (temporary, controlled or permanent) or those people are having their liberties infringed on. The story of Robin Hood is an example of how the survival imperative and the rights of nobility clash. When people don't have the right to own or acquire property, they need to either assert their rights against those who do, or they simply suffer the oppression. Ownership of property can be oppressive to those who are disenfranchised or excluded from the system. In most legal systems those who don't own anything are outside the law.
Modern examples of this principle would be the spaces inside stores, access to telephone or internet services, access to streets and roads, and access to rivers, canals or oceans. But your modern day wanna-be aristocrats try to confuse the issue by confusing the "commons" with "collectivism. Compare these terms for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
Chris
There is a lot of talk, logic and thought that goes into developing law and legal theory. Not being a lawyer, this stuff is both strange and fascinating to me. however it is "jargon" and it is jargon that makes perfect sense to the initiated but often is unintelligable to the rest of us. I wouldn't touch the subject myself except that I don't feel satisfied that I understand what my "rights" really are, what they should be, or with the direction the country is going. Law does not 'belong' solely to the lawyers. Rather lawyers are simply the paid (and certified) experts on the subject. We can't afford to let them 'own' it -- because any monopoly tends to lead to tyranny -- and because the law defines the attributes of our society, business and property, power and security.
Worst some of the people that keep trying to inform me about rights and definitions seem more confused about the subject than I am. So I started looking at the words, and analyzing them. What do the authors really mean? This is a meditation on the subject that I've been doing for some time now, and it is beginning to bear fruit for me in that I at least feel I'm starting to understand what the terms mean, and the meditating on the subject has helped me figure out where I "should" stand on issues logically as well as subjectively.
This confusion I'm referred to is all over the place. Look at the word Subject and Object. Does the meaning of the term pop out at you? What happens when you read that the meanings in philosophy, political science, computer science and grammer seem completely different. Even within computer science the word "object" has multiple meanings. You would think there would be a clear consistency between the definitions -- yet the way they are used shows that we human beings (at least English Speaking ones) don't really have the definition down. The words are used radically differently between disciplines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object
A simple word "subject", or "object" has so many meanings. For that reason in my meditations I've been first trying to create definitions of them that I can apply generally and that are consistent between these different dictionary meanings. I've been able to do that. That, is one reason why this "meditation" seems -- to me at least -- worthwhile. Much of our confusion as a society comes from the confusion as to what these principles are.
And by the way "confusion" is one of the negative attributes of lawlessness.
Chris
Rev Greg Made some interesting comments:
Yet, I think what makes Critical Buddhism critical is this effort to make the distinction. What is the example of the Buddha? Where is Buddhism clearly distinguished from the Hindu substrate it originated in? The only real core of Buddhism is the principle that the goal of the practitioner is enlightenment, and that the obstacles to enlightenment need to be identified and defined and that the practitioner has to find his path to reach that goal.
Therefore learning from all teachers, following the path, being "critical" in seeking enlightenment and distinguishing what is "not enlightenment" from what is "enlightened" in a loving and attentive manner is what defines Buddhism.
The rest is local "upaya". Maybe the Sun is male God, maybe it is a female god, maybe it is no god. Maybe monks should wear orange, maybe gray, and maybe sweatsuits.
Maybe the Japanese have the right idea with their hierarchical collective all bound to their vision of a "Sensei" -- maybe not. It is the job of the Buddhist to point out the "maybe not" when folks are sure that such a thing "definately is" -- when it isn't. It is also the duty of the Buddhist to say "Okay that path is a fine path, but doesn't it lead to a chasm over there?"
There is a joke going around about a modern publicicist seeking to retrace an explorer's footsteps who climed Mt. Kilamanjaro. Everyone says "oh that is a fine idea!" But one wag who knows better says 'that's not for me' that fellow died a horrible death falling into a chasm.
Chris
Rights are fundamentally about property, about
ownership. Every right is about establishing people's relationships
with abstract properties "characteristics" which are owned and
defined by that right. Earlier I mentioned the idea of the right to
privacy; "to be secure in one's personal effects" as being about the
right to own one's personal space. I also discussed the right to
freedom as the right to own one's own life-space. These are not new
ideas. In each case the properties involved are about not just "real-
estate" but also the more figurative ownership of one's thoughts,
one's products, one's ideas, one's words, etcetera. Rights are
permissions. Permissions are grants of ownership. And Abstract
rights are the assumed generalized permissions that all of
us "should" own.
Rights are about defining what we "own" and what we "don't own" in
our sphere of interactions with one another.
Thus at the basis of most further rights beyond those of the "right to
privacy" and related freedoms; liberal, rights, comes the issue of
rights as being about the question: "How in a social system do we
negotiate the 'pursuit of happiness?'" This goes to the issues of
agreement between people and justice -- about ownership.
Most of our more thorny rights issues come about as people negotiate
their way through the world of other people. As it has been said 'my
rights end where another person's begins." That means basically
"my rights" are the things I own. But I don't have rights to things I don't own. And if you claim something that I claim or want to claim, than we have a problem."
The reality of rights is that they don't end with just our own personal freedom or liberty. There is a whole different class of rights that has to do with how we bridge the question of "what do I do when someone else has something I want?"
This is an entire different class of rights. We are talking about those rights that bridge individual needs and actions defined between individuals. As we figure out what makes us happy or unhappy we have to exercise judgement. When we
exericise judgement we are entering the realm of "justice" -- where we
are our own judges.
When operating on our own, with our own resources, the judgements can
be simple. Do I eat spinach or lettuce? Do I put on a sweater or a
suit? Once we get agreement inside, we exercise a judgement and take an
action. The power to judge and make decisions is one of the things that
defines us as human beings. It also defines all the rights we live
under. Judgement calculates attributes. Attributes are the
characteristics and borders of actions and their consequences. We
operate perfectly free within our space, but under limits established
by the nature of that space itself. I wear a suit to an interview, or
to a meeting with my cients. I wear a sweater when it is cold. I wear a
sweater under my suit when both conditions are true. Judgement is also
about exercising power. If a person doesn't own a sweater, or isn't
strong enough to put it on. Then all the desire in the world to wear
one is for naught unless one gets help from someone else.
Judgement and agreement are also how we negotiate our "rights" as we
communicate with others. Travel and verbal communication are the way we
acquire the majority of our needs. We do this by exchange. We arrive at
exchange by making agreements with others. Those agreements establish
what we are willing to trade for what. They involve the exchange of
promises, communiations and delivery of goods, and actions (services).
At the heart of our pursuit of happiness is the exchange. The legal
term for exchange is "contract." It is by negotiating exchanges,
transactions and contracts with one another that we traverse the world.
Justice is about fair exchanges. It is about agreement. When we are
happy with our transactions we are happy with the world. An equal
exchange isn't about equal goods literally, but about equal
satisfaction from the exchange. We consider a transaction just when
both sides are happy with the result. Thus justice is at its core
about "happy transactions" -- about agreement between people and
agreeable exchange. Agreeable exchanges are "legitimate" by
definition. The legal is the lawful, and the law is about ensuring that
agreements, contracts and exchanges are "lawful", "legitimate", or
agreeable to all the parties.
Thus the most basic element of the law is the agreement or the
contract, which defines what properties a person owns and exchanges.
All principles are basically "abstractions" that express generalizations about reality. At their most abstract their definition is usually in terms of other abstracts. That is why, when we think, and argue about rights, we need to link those rights to more tangible things. That link is there. It is there because the notion expresses a pure idea, something that when applied well benefits all of us.
It doesn't take non-human experience to make one realize that the very notion of, or principle of "basic human rights" is an assertion of human beings based on assumptions made by human beings. One merely has to talk to people from other cultures to realize that the notion hasn't always yet translated.
However, principles don't live or die by a single generations opinions, they evolve out of generalizations that crystalize what may take years or even millennia of effort and passed on wisdom. They are defined by the attributes of what they are -- and of what they aren't.
The notion of basic human rights may have gotten its first human expression in the Western Eurasian region, but it is an expression of universal human existence and belongs to the world. The goal of this series is to unlock these links by expressing them using modern logic. I'm not doing anything new, and I'd be surprised if I don't find others have done the same exercise. Indeed I find a similar effort here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/ except they never link the subject with the real world.
Principles represent generalizations. The definition of fundamental principles is usually in terms of equally abstract ideas. Thus Liberty is the expression of Freedom. Freedom is the attribute of "owning" one's own personal space, of being "free to do as one pleases" -- within that personal space.
From an "individual view" we all want to have the most freedom possibly. But to justify rights to the parts of the world that doesn't believe in them we have to take a "systems view" and explain why that is best for the "common good" -- or the sum of the general welfare. Because no individual's freedom is safe if the general welfare is at risk.
The goal of the right of freedom from the systems view is to grant people the permission to do the things they do best. Anyone familiar with software or living systems knows that to get good systems one has to grant each of the elements of that system the "rights" and "permissions" to do its job. Freedom is essential for the health of society in a similar manner. No "controller" can exercise so much control as the "self control" of a well programmed (well trained) self governing entity. At the same time, that "freedom" has to have defined boundaries, because people like computer programs tend to inadvertently (or like viruses intentionally) transgress their boundaries and infringe on other people and processes.
I don't want to make anybody wade through the oodles of material about Computer and Software security, but I have to do so as part of my "day job" and so I've gotten to noticing the similarities in issues, and some of the good ideas that are developing in the software field that could apply to legal and moral ideas equally. If anyone is interested in following these ideas further (and can stay awake) I'll include URl's. The URL that got me thinking on this I can't find right now, but there are oodles of them, and they disagree about a lot but they agree on some basics.
There are differences on the subject Microsoft says;
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/transcripts/20040212securitymlTranscript.aspx
While this author says:http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/11/14/2115222&from=rss but they all deal with similar issues to what we deal with when talking about human rights; privacy, access to the "system" versus access to the software program space.
But the first basic point of all these efforts to define what it takes to have a secure system is that a secure system starts with giving rights to the elements of the system within a certain "ownership action space." That is the principle of the "least minimal rights" means that at the very least there are minimal rights that each element of a system should have -- and that starts with the freedom to perform the functions the program is intended to do. Similarly each human being should be free to pursue his or her happiness in the best manner he or she can.
The second basic point of security and rights is that they are opposite sides of the same coin. We have the right to "liberty" within our own space -- but not to infringe on the liberty of either our fellow human beings or the "system" that links us together. Unlike software however, the 'system' of human rights also defines a "right" for all human beings to be part of that system. We have to find some way to eliminate viruses, trojans, resource hogs, and other infringements done by our fellow human beings -- without eliminating those human beings -- behaving in an unjust manner. People can get too caught up in a mechanistic idea of human society and start applying these theories absurdly (and ultimately tragically) to their fellow human beings. When that happens the murder of humans can become a "selection" or a "purge."
We owe a debt of gratitude to the founders of this country and to our
ancestors for defining principles and goals which we usually refer to
as 'rights'. The founding fathers expressed that people are endowed
with "inalienable rights" and laid the source for those rights as "from
the creator." We can repay the debt of gratitude we owe them by putting
aside sophistry and weak logic and putting these goals and principles
into solid logic so that people can be clear about what rights are, how
they are defined, what they aren't, and why we should have the rights
we assert in a world where people profane reigion to use G-d as their
reason for violating them. The logic of rights is clear and simple if
people will just think clearly.
The fundmental rights are based on the common goals of mankind. These
goals are expressed as abstractions. The kind of abstraction we are
talking about is a very generalized vision. The most fundamental common
goal of people is expressed in terms like "happiness"
or "enlightenment" which can be expressed as abstracted visions or
pictures of the ideal state of the individual in conjunction with the
community. All rights are founded on the conditions necessary to
achieve these abstract states like "happiness" or "heaven."
Happiness might be defined as a state of absolute freedom, equality,
achievement and extinction of all desires, compassion, wisdom,
knowledge of all good things, goodwill, and where the emotions that
results from these things (happiness endorphins) are present. Not ony
is the state abstract, but the conditions that contribute to that stte
are either abstract themselves or transitory.
The abstract vision of "happiness" makes a fitting ultimate goal
nevertheless, because while all the conditions described may not be
fullly realizable at any given moment, they form a common goal around
which definitions can be made which make it possible to travel towards
actualizing some approximation of that state. Thus the appropriate
associated right is the "right to pursue happiness." The State of
happiness forms a set of boundaries for the conditions that define that
state. And the abstracted conditions form abstract rights from which
concrete rights can be derived, defined, enforced, and maintained.
That set of boundaries is a "space or realm" of rights. And
essentially the act of defining rights is the act of spelling out human
realms. Essentially all rights derive from space.
The first two core rights therefore are "liberty" and "freedom." Sentient beings should be able to "pursue happiness" to their hearts content within their own "space." Liberties are those things we are at liberty to do. Freedom is the
space within which we are at liberty. Human beings are by definition
absolutely free within their human space, within the boundaries of time
space within which we dwell. The most fundamental right therefore that
we need is that of "owning" the space within which we dwell. We should
be absolutely free within our own space.
Our own space can also be defined as at the minimum our "personal
sphere." Thus being free and sovereign within our private person,
papers and effects is a first right we all must assert in order to
function freely.
Freedom is necessary to be 'ourselves' -- to do the things we do best.
To be "all that we can be." In order to pursue happiness.
The next set of abstract rights derive from the boundary conditions
that define us as human beings. Just as we want to be free within our
own realms, we also have a fundamental need to be secure from
infringement on our own rights. The opposite of freedom is slavery --
to be owned or controlled by another. Thus the boundary condition for
freedom is that our freedom is defined by our boundaries with others.
The next right is therefore an interface between our realm and that of
our neighbors. We need "justice" -- or the right to be "secure in our
person. To own what is ours, to not suffer theft, conversion, or
intrusion from others." Justice interfaces between our freedom and
liberty and that of others. It's definition is that others
don't "infringe" on the rights and permissions of others. Group rights
re intended to protect groups of individuals, but ultimately what needs
protection are the rights and liberties of the indidual, because the
happiness of the group is the expression of the sum of the happiness of
each individual. Injustice creates unhappiness, denies liberty and
stiffles freedom. Justice enforces boundaries that enable happiness,
prevents infringement, and enables each person the liberty to maximize
the expression of themselves.
These are the "fundamental" rights because they define the limits or
boundary space in which we can most successfully pursue happiness in a
society where we have to interact with other human beings. They are
abstract rights, but they help define the specific ennabling rights
that make them a reality.
(part 1)
Chris