|
home · articles · ubuntu and the value of the commons |
Revisioning iCommons
In 2005, iCommons was established as an outgrowth of Creative Commons with an objective to ‘advance the wider dissemination of non-commercial sharing of scientific, creative and other intellectual works by the general public’. Creative Commons was the sole member, guarantor and sponsor of the charity, providing organisational and financial support.
Today, iCommons has a small,... more
|
| |
Ubuntu and the Value of the Commons
|
| |
 We did an audio interview with Jason, where he expands on some of the ideas expressed in this article. To download the AAC file directly, click here. For the mp3 file, click here. And for the Ogg Vorbis file, click here.
For direct subscribing to the podcast feed:
AAC RSS
MP3 RSS
OGG RSS
Also look for it in iTunes and at Podcast Alley
I work in moral philosophy, which means that I spend my time trying to understand values, and what they should mean for us. Rather than being abstracted from everyday life, this strikes me as one of the most practical things anyone could be concerned with. Nonetheless, this may come off a tad abstract ' but bear with me and I hope it'll be worth it.
In this article I will discuss what I take to be meaningful convergences between ubuntu and the Free Culture/iCommons project ' starting with a brief outline of what ubuntu is (and isn't).
Ubuntu is South Africa's contribution to moral philosophy; an ethic entailing or entailed by the claim 'umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu' ' roughly, 'being a person is being a person through people.' The term is thrown around far more often than it is examined or understood, and there is no single uncontroversial understanding of what it amounts to, but the outline is interesting: an ethical system or principle that strongly emphasises our moral and ontological interdependence ' or, as former Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it ' it means that our humanity is 'inextricably bound up' in that of others. In his book, No Future Without Forgiveness, Tutu's canonical account of ubuntu continues:
Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum ' the greatest good. Anything that subverts or undermines this sought-after good is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good.
About as important as this definition is an understanding of what ubuntu is not talking about ' there have been a number of attempts to explain ubuntu, and even more to use it without explaining it.
So before looking at the implications of ubuntu, here is a quick list of what I take to be common misperceptions of what ubuntu amounts to or entails:
- Religious models: Though it has become a popular topic of research and discussion among Christian theologians (and mystical hippies), ubuntu is not an essentially religious system. Versions of the concept appear just as often in cultures that argue from a humanist ethical basis as from a religious one - and Kwasi Wiredu has noted in his book, A Companion to African Philosophy, that such a Humanist basis is pervasive among African cultures. If that doesn't seem convincing, the ultimate test is just that it can be meaningfully discussed, without seeming to be changing the subject, without mentioning religion ' as good a reason as any to treat them as two distinct ideas.
- Ancestors: The veneration of ancestors is sometimes folded into ubuntu, but again, this is conflating two distinct issues. Ubuntu is extended to ancestors where they form a part of the culture, but doesn't, by itself, entail anything about ancestors.
- Patriarchy/Traditionalism: Ubuntu seems to be in tension with patriarchy, and doesn't boil down to traditionalism simply because it arose in a traditional context (again, we can talk meaningfully about ubuntu without committing to a traditionalist project).
- Inexplicability: Ubuntu is an interesting principle, which seems to suggest novel resolutions to tricky problems ' not some quaintly anthropological puzzle to be thrown around as an inexplicable buzzword.
As I said, there is some controversy about definitions, and you may disagree with what I've outlined above, but at least you have some idea of what I'm not talking about (and I think that I have at least given good reasons for excluding what I do).
Now, while there are a bundle of really interesting claims that follow from ubuntu, one seems particularly relevant in the context of Creative Commons: the claim that there is something wrong with 'success through aggressive competitiveness.'
Here the claim is that there is something wrong with insisting too strongly on our property rights (intellectual and otherwise), and failing to share when we have a reasonable opportunity to do so.
This is a familiar claim from CC discussions. There the most common strategy is to point out that many of the 'successes' of such a competitive system are only localised ' while certain individuals benefit in the short term, their benefit comes at some significant expense to others, either by depleting common resources, retarding development, or changing conditions such that using resources efficiently becomes much more difficult.
A lot of the formative discussion of CC licensing and the need for a Free Culture movement centred on the way the dominant intellectual property regime retards progress and creativity ' highlighting the previously under-discussed notion of the "Tragedy of the anti-commons.'
'Tragedy of the Commons' problems occur when individuals over-use a common resource by pursuing their own interest without regard for the overall impact, while 'Tragedy of the Anti-Commons' situations occur when such individuals under-utilise a resource by each insisting on their exclusionary rights.
As a solution to tragedies of the anti-commons, Larry Lessig has pointed to Carol Rose's notion of the 'Comedy of the Commons,' in which resources can become more useful when utilised by many people (here we can immediately think of open source developing, musical remixing, and CC-enabled translating).
So the idea here is that an intellectual property regime ' and a culture ' which insists too strenuously on rights of exclusion is covering up the hidden cost of 'tragedy' situations. More excitingly, the tantalising suggestion is that a free culture, founded on a more permissive understanding of use, might offer solutions to these 'tragedies' where none had seemed workable.
This really is interesting, and ubuntu would certainly agree (in fact, these conclusions may well be intuitively obvious from an ubuntu perspective). But ubuntu would say more than this ' and what it does have to say seems to me to tell us something interesting about the value of the commons.
There is another kind of claim we can use here, a kind of value claim. Collaboration, contributing to a shared project, isn't just valuable to us as artists or innovators looking for greater efficiency ' it's good for us as people.
Ubuntu entails the claim that sharing/collaborating is immensely valuable in and for itself, in the same way that that a good meal and brisk morning swim are. In fact, ubuntu claims that sharing is at the core of all of the greatest human values, and is by default superior to the alternative in most cases.
If this sounds obvious, or doesn't seem like a particularly deep or novel suggestion, then think of the following experiences: blogging; editing or contributing toward a wiki; adding something to the commons.
Now ask yourself if the default individualist discourse, commonly 'offline', really gives enough weight to that experience, or even gives us a vocabulary adequate to properly describe it. My intuition says "no". It says that the kick of wellbeing felt by kiddies on Facebook, Wikipedians, bloggers or members of the Linux development community is something (essential to our being) that isn't given much space in the late twentieth century culture we've inherited.
This isn't just about the pleasure of interaction with others ' though that's certainly part of it, and certainly a basic value. It's about the experience of drawing from and contributing to something shared, being part of a community in a sense deeper than the immediate buzz of interaction. This is what the word 'ubuntu' is supposed to remind us of when it gets lobbed around like a memic hand-grenade ' that the deepest values, the most meaningful experiences, all involve sharing. And that we're forgetting something crucial if we build or operate in systems that don't take this into account.
This is what Julius Nyere and Kwame Nkrumah were hoping would be remembered when they tried to build societies based on ujamaa or African Socialism. But at least part of the reason they failed to do so was that the world had already changed, and the nature of modernising society didn't allow the kind of connectedness that could remind us of this.
But, the world has changed again.
The new forms of interconnectedness we're discovering means that I could talk about the value of collaboration earlier, with a real hope that you would think of an experience, not some abstractly sketched ideal.
And that means that it may be easier to see what Bishop Tutu meant when he said:
There is a movement, not easily discernable, at the heart of things to reverse the awful centrifugal force of alienation, brokenness, division, hostility, and disharmony.
Taken together then, Free Culture's founding insight and ubuntu's concern with interdependence suggest that a culture of excessive individualism (and the insistence on individual's rights of exclusion) doesn't account for itself very well - it omits mention of the hidden cost of 'tragedy' situations, and disallows the extensive benefits of extensive collaboration.
Now, according to the old dichotomy of absolute/nonexistent intellectual property rights, that critique could be accepted, while copyrights were still defended as the least bad option - but not anymore. What CC licenses (and GPL's, etc.) offer, in many if not all cases - is the option popular in ubuntu discussions since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ' a 'third way,' the paradigm-smashing proof that better ways remain to tackle the seemingly intractable.
But a new licensing regime ' even a revolutionary one ' can do no more than offer the promise of producing something better. Realising this promise, and the richer value ubuntu points us toward, requires that the commons be fully developed as a common-wealth, a body of practice, and a living culture.
This (I gather) is the project of iCommons, and early signs are staggeringly positive. The emergence of the Free Culture movement seems to me to be one of the most tangible reasons for hope in the world, and seems to fit what Bishop Tutu said not too long ago - that:
Now and again we catch a glimpse of the better thing for which we are meant [â?¦] then we experience fleetingly that we are made for togetherness, for friendship, for community, for family; that we are created to live in a delicate network of interdependence.
Growing such networks, then, seems like a very worthwhile project indeed.
Jason van Niekerk teaches philosophy in the part-time studies programme at Wits University in Johannesburg. He completed his Master's degree at Rhodes University, and has started reading towards his PHD at Wits University; the title of his dissertation is 'Ubuntu and moral value'. He was recently published in the Mail and Guardian, read his article online, here.
Photograph: Holding hands, by Rosenwald, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
tags: other
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote