‘If commoning has any meaning it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject.’
- Sylvia Federici —
Re-enchanting the World — Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
I must warn the reader that this chapter on the commons is probably the most difficult to follow. I have tried to sweep up all the various authors’ thoughts on the meanings of capital and commons and harmonise them into something that I trust is coherent. I hope the reader will persevere through the following pages, so as to get a grounding for the remainder of the book. Many of the terms introduced in this chapter are also summarised in the Glossary, so it is worth checking back there for an overview, particularly with regard to the various ‘commons’ and ‘capitals’ we will be exploring.
A commons means different things to different people. In this chapter I am mostly taking it to have the political meaning of shared land and property and shared resources, but we will be looking at wider definitions as well, as the discussion of the book continues.
In much of the developing world a commons is still the norm rather than the odd aberration that it has come to be in developed nations. I’m suggesting though that for the developed world a commons still exists, but in less recognisable forms. For instance, we accept that most roads are publicly owned, there are public buildings, city squares and pavements. Arguably this is public space rather than commons, but it is still a ‘commonised’ resource. Up to a point, wealth is shared by taxation; in the UK we are not forced to pay directly for public services such as education and health care, so the costs of these facilities are commonised.
So, if we were to be more aware of the commons, we’d see that it does not have to be re-invented where there has previously been nothing remotely considered a commons. It is more a question of shifting the boundaries — literally and metaphorically — as to what is described as commons and what is not. In the light of these thoughts, this chapter asks: What should we share? Are there changes to the way a commons is defined in society that would make us all happier and also protect nature and maintain her and us in ecological stability?
Anyone who has heard the term commons at all is likely to immediately think of the so-called ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. In its modern form, the name comes from an essay by Garrett Hardin. Traditionally, a commons was land available for ordinary people to do such things as graze cattle, collect firewood, forage and plant crops. Over time however, pressure from wealthy landowners resulted in ‘enclosures’, whereby the commoners, starting in England, were increasingly shut out from the land that had previously provided for their sustenance. Hardin, in his essay, takes up the traditional view of the commons and asks us to imagine individuals with cattle that they wish to graze on a particular piece of common land. Each such person, in their own self-interest, would be motivated to increase the number of cattle they graze so as to maximise the benefit derived from the land in the short-term. However, if everyone acts this way, then the land will be over-grazed and everyone will lose out. Hence, the tragedy. Hardin was not simply referring us back to something that might have happened in the past. His essay was really suggesting that we are doing the same thing on a much grander scale in today’s world. Whilst, in the developed world at least, there is little or no common land remaining, nonetheless there are ‘commons’ of fossil fuels, forests, clean water, fish, minerals and ores. In the interests of short-term gain, we burn our way through these and risk our long-term tragedy. (Critics of the Tragedy of the Commons theory point out that societies with common land for grazing or crops never have individuals acting in their own self-interest — there is always a community. But this, whilst true, rather misses the point of Hardin’s argument. The developed world is essentially a world of private interests — a Privatopia — so the Tragedy of the Commons is a very real possibility, indeed an increasing reality.)
In a book, Filters Against Folly, Hardin goes on to explain a bit more about dealing with the potential tragedy identified in his commons essay.1 Here, he makes the crucial distinction between a managed and an unmanaged commons. Hardin asks, Who benefits? Who pays? He suggests three alternatives — privatise, commonise or socialise. To privatise is to accrue the benefits of what we are doing, and to take responsibility for any losses. (This would be something like a business, acting responsibly, cleaning up any pollution, recycling, avoiding contributing to climate change and not using up resources that cannot be replaced.) To commonise, in Hardin’s terms, is essentially the Tragedy of the Commons scenario. Individuals or businesses privatise profits — so keep them to themselves, and thereby benefit in the short-term — but commonise losses. So, everyone pays for clearing up pollution, adapting to climate change, etc. This is a ‘commons’ of sorts, but it is a blind commons that is forced on us because of the selfishness and irresponsibility of others. To socialise, by contrast, is a ‘managed commons’. The gains and losses are shared out in a conscious and purposeful way. The full quote from Hardin’s book is given in the endnote.
We can see echoes of the same mindset in Adam Smith’s notion that if everyone is working blindly towards their own self-interest this creates — by way of an ‘invisible hand’ — a better society. But this idea is also the very idea that leads to the Tragedy of the Commons.
The important thing to grasp here is that a managed commons offers us the best hope of avoiding disaster in the future and a managed commons relies on community and good governance. So, it’s not that there is no commons right now. It’s that there is a commons of the worst possible kind. All the profit is extracted by a few. All the mess and waste is a shared cost borne by everyone. In summary, we are privatising profits and commonising losses when we could be sharing profits and privatising loss. (Some might have preferred if Hardin had exchanged what he meant by socialise and commonise in his explanations, but hopefully his meaning is still clear. It is a managed commons that Hardin is promoting. In fact, later in life, Hardin reflected that it might have been better for him to have called his essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons’.2) We might add here, as is often said, that there is no commons without community; indeed no commons without a suitable economic model to regulate it. Authors Maria Mies and Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen (The Subsistence Perspective) say:
‘In our view, we cannot simply say, “no commons without community”, we must also say, “no commons without economy”, in the sense of oikonomia, ie. the production of human beings within the social and natural household. Hence, reinventing the commons is linked to the reinvention of the communal and the commons-based economy.’
Natural Commons as Resource and Wild Nature
As we’ve seen above, the usual conception of the commons is about land that provides shared grazing for animals or shared space for growing food. And then we hear about ‘enclosures’, where the land becomes private property. Land is taken by those with power and then rented back to those who once used it for free. The idea of enclosure vividly describes the process whereby features of the world that were once wild and free have become commodified.
It is nature that provides the resources of the commons, and it is clearly nature still that provides the resources, even after enclosures have been devised by humans. We did not make a change to this by enclosing land, but we shifted attention from our reliance on nature over to an emphasis on production, rent and profit. The link back to nature became obscured — and this process has only become worse. I am using the term ‘natural commons’ for what nature provides for us — that is — the natural resources we need in order to survive. There are natural resources that can be replaced or replenished, whist other resources that, so far as the Earth is concerned, will be used up forever.
It should be pointed out though, that common land can be owned by someone, either an individual or the government, yet still remain a commons. As the last chapter tried to show, defining the commons is therefore not necessarily about ownership. The key thing is how the land is cared for and how a ‘managed commons’ is achieved.
The whole world has been at least indirectly affected by human activity. Chemicals in the air and water and changes to the atmosphere are all-pervasive and likely to increase in the foreseeable future. Even so, places that are as much untouched by humanity as possible are, I believe, critically important. The term I’m using in this work for such places is ‘wild nature’. Those places where, as yet, the human footprint is light, need to be preserved and protected at all costs. Wild nature belongs as much to the other fauna and flora with which we share this world as it belongs to us. Wild nature is where the privileges all belong to the animals, birds, insects, trees and plants that live there, instead of to us humans. If we go to such places at all, it is only to visit, or perhaps there are indigenous people living there, so close to nature that their footprint is exceptionally light. Wild nature, then, is not a ‘common wealth’ in the sense of offering us resources for food, energy, minerals or whatever. Its value is not even by way of absorbing Carbon Dioxide and regulating rainfall and its run-off and in preserving and making soil. Its real value is just for itself, and for its beauty and its nourishment to the human soul. Chapter 8 — Nature — considers these matters in more detail. American biologist E. O. Wilson has the idea of ‘half Earth’ — leaving (or, giving back) half the Earth to nature and using only the remaining half for humans. (At the time of writing, humans take up about two thirds of available land area — in the 1960’s it was only around one third.)
It might be argued that indigenous peoples, and even people who abandon ‘developed’ society and choose to live ‘off-grid’, are not necessarily going to draw the sharp distinction between ‘wild nature’ and ‘natural resources’ that I am suggesting here. It is a fair point, but for one thing, the numbers of such people are very small, so their impact is minimal. For another thing, the belief systems of indigenous people (and even some off-gridders) will often mean they live in a careful balance with nature. Even though that balance may not be as I have defined it here, I think something similar is implicit. Indigenous people often have a relationship and reciprocity with nature that ‘developed’ societies have largely lost and which would be difficult to replicate.
The relationship of nature, place, the natural commons and wild nature are shown in the figure below.
Figure 3.1 Nature, Place, Natural Commons, Wild Nature
The Commons, Wealth and Capital
I have chosen to identify nature as partly a resource and partly as wild nature in order to clarify what is going on when we look to her for our sustenance. The resource aspect of nature — what I’m calling the natural commons — is what was traditionally just called ‘Land’ by economists, as we discussed in the previous chapter. I have separated this out from wild nature. Wild nature, as we’ve said above, belongs to the animals, the birds, the fish, the trees and the plants. We humans may find beauty and rest within wild nature, but not ‘resources’ in the traditional sense. Inevitably there is some cross-over. Old growth forests, for instance, sit on the borderline between what might be a resource and what might be preserved as wild nature. The important thing is to be conscious about what we are doing — to have a ‘managed commons’ of resources, in Hardin’s terms — rather than blindly and inadvertently destroying both wild nature and the natural commons. The first act of managing is to make clear this split between what is reasonable to be used and what needs to remain untouched.3
Classical economics recognises that for wealth to be wealth, some kind of work needs to be done in order to render natural resources useable. Some of this wealth is then consumed directly whilst some is retained as ‘capital’ for future use. We need then to introduce human work and labour in order to produce wealth and capital. All capital is wealth, but not all wealth is capital. This process was illustrated in Figure 2.1 in the last chapter. The figure below combines Figure 2.1 with Figure 3.1 to show how the two relate.
Figure 3.2 Natural Commons -> Resource + Work/Labour = Wealth ->
Capital + Consumption
An important point to note here — which I will discuss again below — is that our material economy with its capital, wealth and consumption, is not somehow ‘outside’ nature. Everything we do is within nature, even although many of the products of human endeavour — including our waste products and pollution — may seem ‘un-natural’. Environmentalists often balk at this conclusion, and perhaps the reason is that by calling everything ‘nature’ this might mean that those who exploit and/or destroy eco-systems then have an ‘excuse’ for their activities. But, in balance, I think describing everything as nature forces us to consider all of our activities as taking place within eco-systems, and this is a positive move. Some economists try to devise a similar pattern or process for the cultural economy as I have shown for the material economy.
Figure 3.3 The Cultural Economy, showing the mirror progression from ‘Resource’ to ‘Capital’
So both those two main economies, the material and the cultural, are shown as linear processes. This is rather typical of our Western thought patterns, where things come from ‘nothing’ and are ultimately ‘consumed’ or destroyed. Everything else in the diagram seems to be floating around these linear processes. We could say that the way we try to organise all our economies wants to force us into these same linear arrangements that we ascribe to the material and the cultural. This sets up an awkward tension in the figures. There will be more to say on this in Chapter 7.
The parallels between the material economy and the cultural might suggest that culture is an ‘industry’ and its functioning mirrors very much the behaviour of the material economy. This might not be a problem for many — indeed it might be a welcome reflection, in their view, that there is a natural order in the way human endeavours of all kinds function. However, for others, the commoning that we have spoken of with regard to natural resources above, takes on an even more important role when it comes to culture. As we will see below, there is a desire to group activities into new definitions of commons. These ideas can be grouped under the collective term creative commons, and require some further exploration.
As I’ve suggested earlier, the terms capital and commons have been expanded to include a variety of different things. Physical capital is sometimes used as an alternative term for the material resources nature provides. Human capital describes our ability to do work, essential, of course, for us to reproduce society through new goods and services. Cultural capital may be a term used to describe the contribution of intelligence, imagination and creativity. (It might be mentioned that imagination and creativity can be used for bad ends as well as good — so, presumably — ‘negative capital’. But in this work I am taking the terms to mean their more usual designation as something positive — something that builds rather than destroys.) Social capital is the value inherent in community that might be realised by way of voluntary work, informal help between neighbours and so on (sometimes referred to as ‘horizontal’ relations, in contrast to more formal work, which is termed ‘vertical’). Financial capital — dealt with more fully in Chapter 7 — recognises how integral money is to the flow of the economy, but also has a life of its own. Perhaps this proliferation of different capitals is a source of confusion. However, authors are perhaps attempting to show that the wealth of a culture owes as much to abstract qualities, such as compassion, imagination and social connections, as it does to physical resources. It might be that this suggests an attempt to quantify the less physical contributions and reduce them to number crunching. So the danger of the ‘capitals’ is that everything gets reduced to economics — or, elevated to economics — depending on your perspective. Along with this, it brings the notions of commodity, scarcity, transactional relationships and cost-benefit analyses. Maybe there is some justification for this with natural and cultural capital, but less so with social capital. But I think the intent of those authors who expand the meaning of capital is to show the richness of human culture and how the economy is actually built off a foundation of social connections. This is the more positive motivation that I have followed here.
To summarise the further definitions of capital:
Physical Capital — What I’ve called Natural Resources, or Material Wealth.
Human Capital — Value innate to people, including labour and work.
Cultural Capital — Intelligence, imagination and creativity
Social Capital — The value in the connections between people — as described by Robert Putman (Bowling Alone). See Chapter 7.
Financial Capital — Sometimes just used to refer to money, but better if it refers to the flow of money in the economy, as a support for the flow of physical resources, material wealth, consumption and material capital. See endnote4 and Chapter 7.
As with capital, there has also been a recent move to widen the meaning of commons, from the natural commons to the inclusion of human imagination and creativity. For the term natural commons itself — sometimes this is used to refer to all of nature. As discussed above however, I have suggested that we divide off part of nature as the commons part so as to recognise it is not all just a resource. But again, I don’t wish to quibble too much over definitions. The fact that many are describing nature in some way as a commons is to be greatly welcomed. The flexibility of all these terms — the commons and the capitals — is probably annoying to academics, but should remind us that all these things are fluid and waiting for us to resolve them into concrete decisions — indeed, our missions and aims will evolve over time, and the definitions we are discussing here will also evolve — it is always a process and not a destination.
The definitions of the more abstract commons I am taking mostly from Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics). Eisenstein identifies a cultural commons of intelligence, inventiveness and technical know-how, a spiritual commons of imagination and creativity and a social commons of compassion and sharing. To summarise the definitions of commons:
Natural Commons — Sometimes referring to all of nature, but preferably referring to that part of nature that humans need for our sustenance, so is used as a material resource.
Cultural Commons — Eisenstein refers to intellectual property and creative copyright here, but I prefer to use the term to refer to the actual wealth produced, as in invention, art, music, literature and celebration, rather than the copyrighting of these. (Perhaps we should also include trademarks, patents and trade secrets, to be concise.)
Spiritual Commons — Imagination and creativity.
Social Commons — Compassion, gifts and sharing.5
Just when you thought we’d mentioned every type of commons, along comes another! The term ‘creative commons’ has started to be used to refer to intellectual property and artistic copyright, so it may safely be regarded as a collective term for the cultural and spiritual commons, following the definitions above — hence, intelligence, creativity, imagination and technical know-how.
In the last chapter, we looked at ideas around the ownership of land and saw that one claim to ownership was on the basis of ‘improvement’. The idea was that if someone spent time and effort clearing a piece of ground of rocks and undergrowth, for instance, and then planted crops, the effort alone was sufficient for the person to claim ownership. (See John Locke.) In Classical economics, a similar argument is made to arrive at a general definition of wealth. Effort must be put in for wealth to be created. (Figure 2.1)
For imagination and creativity and their concomitant intellectual and creative copyright, we might take that same argument of improvement and apply it to the more abstract ideas of creativity and know-how. Minds need to be trained and the ideas of our imaginations take a lot of effort to bring to fruition as an invention, an artwork or a book. We might conclude therefore that the ‘improvement’ invested to bring something from an idea to an invention or a product mirrors the process of bringing natural resources into material wealth. The wealth that is created is cultural wealth and the capital derived from this is cultural capital.
Alternatively — and this is what is often behind the proposal for a creative commons — there is sometimes the wish that all cultural wealth should be a gift. Indeed, the term ‘creative commons’ tends to conflate imagination and creativity with their output — the cultural wealth — and downplays all the effort that goes into bringing the promptings of imagination to birth as actual inventions, artworks, music and so forth. It is an argument therefore against creative copyright and intellectual property rights. Personally, I have no quibble with those who wish to offer their gifts without remuneration. But I feel that the parallels of material wealth and capital with creative wealth and capital are worth making. For artists engaged in social justice for instance, this is a critical issue, so we can appreciate the challenge they have in resolving such questions. They may wish to see the cultural commons as emblematic of a ‘gift economy’, an idea we will be exploring in Chapter 7.
The creative commons sits on the border between the material economy (where most things are commodified) and the social commons (where most things are gifts). In fact, culture is a way that the importance of the social commons can be brought to light. There is a further way to look at things, which might be helpful. The reader may recall that in the previous chapter we considered the difference between ‘property’ and ‘possession’ with regard to land. The first term regarded land simply as commodity. The second recognised a social responsibility that went along with ownership; a responsibility that is expressed well by the notions of stewardship and custodianship. The debates over intellectual property rights and artistic copyright get very complex. The notion of stewardship may be a way that we can cut through these arguments to a sensible balance. As with land ownership, it is not ownership itself that is the real problem, it is how that ownership relates us to society. Social relations feature as much in the cultural economy as in the material — arguably more so. Could we find a way of rewarding the efforts of those who generate cultural wealth that also recognises the social aspect of what they produce? Could we have intellectual and artistic possession, rather than property — and what would this mean? The reader will appreciate, I’m sure, that a lot hinges on what we are like as people and how our societies function. I’m not going to explore this too much further here. However, I think one useful parallel can be drawn between the culture of today and how we treat the culture of the past.
Some material production of past generations starts to be regarded as cultural wealth and of course artworks, literature and music endure beyond the lives of their creators. The cultural wealth feeds back to us as a resource, both in terms of artefacts and also physical places — buildings and landscapes. We often see these as a shared inheritance. This is partly because their creators are no longer around to benefit from what they have produced and also because communities, and sometimes nations, rightly regard such things as part of their culture. In the UK, we have protection for historic buildings by awarding them listed status, whilst whole areas of towns and cities may be protected in Conservation Areas. Landscapes, meanwhile, benefit from a variety of safeguards such as ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, National Parks and ownership by the National Trust. Sometimes when historic buildings are under threat in other countries, concerns are raised, indeed there are places that have World Heritage Status to protect them. Likewise, artefacts in museums and art galleries can be the subject of national and international interest when they are bought and sold or moved to new locations.
Historic artefacts, buildings and landscapes can often still be owned by someone and the owners may derive benefit from their ownership. Such owners are not the creators of their property, but they may well be its protectors and custodians. We see items that were once the products of human creativity moving gradually into a kind of common ownership. The more significant those things are considered to be, the wider the pool of people who regard them as somehow a shared inheritance. In this process any current owners seem to have an ever greater degree of trust and responsibility placed upon them for what they ‘possess’.
I hope the parallel with intellectual property and artist copyright is clear. As with cultural heritage, our contemporary cultural wealth could be treated with similar kinds of mutual agreements and shared responsibilities. Indeed, we can refer this right back to our material economy, and recognise the shared responsibilities around the natural commons and wild nature.
The Prospects for Common Good Laws
According to Montesquieu: ‘the state owes all citizens a secure subsistence, food, suitable clothes and a way of life that does not damage their health.’ (The Spirit of the Laws). It is tempting to see our understanding of the commons as fixed, but a look back in history reminds us that laws around land, sea and air have gone through countless changes and there are thousands of variations across the world. The commons is a process rather than a set of fixed laws and our governments are themselves processes. A process is open to change, so a change in our views of ownership and commons is a realistic possibility. I think climate change in particular has alerted us to the unfairness currently integral to the way the natural commons is exploited for the benefit of a few, whilst the rest of us pay for cleaning up the mess.
If the current systems aren’t working, then what system will work? In my own country of Scotland, the terms ‘common land’ and ‘common goods’ (which includes buildings and sometimes furniture and other items) have a specific meaning. All 32 local authorities have a responsibility to keep records of common land and common goods and to hold a common good fund for any revenue that may be raised from their use, such as the rent of buildings. In fact, these laws are amongst the oldest in Scotland and some relatively recent proceedings have served to clarify the law with regard to the commons. England, likewise, had its ‘Charter of the Forest’ that dates back to the Magna Carta, although it was eventually taken into other laws in a much-diluted form. Guy Standing tells us:
‘The Charter of the Forest [1217] asserted the rights of the common man to subsistence and to what were called estovars, the means of subsistence in the commons. In the thirteenth century, every church was required to read out the charter to congregations four times a year. One remarkable feature inserted in the revised Magna Carta was the right granted to widows to “reasonable estovar of the commons”. Every widow had the right to a basic income, in the form of the right to take food, fuel and housing materials from the commons.’ (Guy Standing — Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen.) See also, Discourse on the Common Weal (1507).
Now that we are realising the importance of the atmosphere, the oceans and our reserves of fossil fuels, it would be very welcome to have the law recognise a global commons more explicitly and to set in place legislation that clearly defines what the commons means today and how use of the commons should be managed. (See especially, Guy Standing — The Plunder of the Commons.)
The above discussion leads us inevitably towards the rules and laws surrounding the management of our natural commons and the protection of wild nature. To be a ‘managed commons’ requires regulation, and this in turn requires governance. See, for instance, Elinor Ostrom’s, The Governance of the Commons, summarised in the endnote.6 For better or worse, it is legislation that shapes our environments. We will be looking at governance in the next three chapters and fitting this together with our understanding of the commons. For now though, here are some ideas to get us underway.
From our discussions, the natural commons of land, sea and air, fossil fuels, fish stocks, minerals, soils and forests is a commons for which we are the custodians and caretakers. If we truly took that on board, then we would be a long way towards taking care of this planet on which we rely, as well as agreeing fair shares amongst ourselves. The authors quoted in the last chapter, especially Henry George and Thomas Paine, have already made one proposal — a ‘ground rent’ payable to the community by land owners. More recent authors such as Adam Lent (Land) have fleshed out how things might work in a modern society. The proposal is now generally known as a Land Value Tax. Variations on this central idea also suggest that the tax may be reflective of the uses to which a particular piece of land is put. If local government were to be strengthened then communities will have a lot more say in how land is used. The social responsibility of land ownership can then be taken up more directly.
We might also see the actions of oil and mining companies brought under new legislation in terms of what they can take from the natural commons, as well as having accountability for the damage done to air, sea and climate. When a global commons is recognised, pollution and climate change take on a slightly different feel, as it is brought home to us that we are all affected. The culprits owe all of us for the damage they have done as we all own the global commons. So, we might see the producers of fossil fuels paying recompense for their share of the damage, and this would be distributed to everyone. This ‘Fee and Dividend’ idea has already been proposed in the USA and other countries. Meanwhile, polluters that affect more local habitats may pay compensation directly to local residents. We might envisage Sovereign Wealth Funds, for income derived from the use of common resources, to be administered and shared out equitably to local residents. Such systems are already in place in Alaska and Norway, amongst a number of other nations.
Peter Barnes (Capitalism 3.0) suggests establishing regulative bodies independent of government, who would make decisions about a nation’s carbon budget, and so on. That way, the problem of governments fearing a backlash from unpopular policies on the use of fossil fuels would be partly overcome, as it would be the regulative body, and not the government, who would be imposing restrictions on the use of the commons. Barnes also suggests putting common good assets under the control of trusteeships, who would then rent the use of those assets back to private business (and, presumably, the government). In a sense, he is suggesting turning around the ‘rentier’ model of capitalism, to work in favour of the commons.
Such systems as sovereign wealth funds, fee and dividend, and the like, are often known collectively as ‘pre-distribution’ — in contrast to ‘re-distribution’. The Earth’s wealth is therefore shared in advance, as it were, rather than waiting for a few people to appropriate it, become rich and then be taxed, so that everyone else will then benefit only indirectly, if at all, from the wealth that arguably belongs to us all.7 (It should be noted that the term pre-distribution is usually used by economists to refer to more mundane things such as minimum wage agreements, unions, good welfare benefits and easy bankruptcy laws. The extension of pre-distribution to include the benefits of a shared commons is stretching the meaning quite substantially!)
Recognising the Commons invites a new Politics
From the discussions I’ve had with a broad range of people, it’s clear that a great many have never heard of the commons. ‘Commoner’ is a derisory term nowadays, but in truth we are all commoners, and if we saw this to mean participants in a vast commons of nature and culture then we might not think it so bad. What’s more, that status of commoner should afford us rights. Those rights need to be taken out, dusted down and looked at anew, before our common heritage is squandered by those who don’t care. I get the impression that if folks were to learn of the Charter of the Forest, for instance, and all the rights and privileges that were afforded all citizens, by law, in earlier centuries, then they may view our current systems as somewhat paltry and unimaginative by comparison! As I’ve discussed above, it is legislation that is needed to make all this happen. So thinking about governance is our next task — answering the question: Who Decides?