How do you get people to follow the rules around maintaining a common pool resource? This is at the core of Ostrom's design principles for analyzing long enduring CPRs. There are always short term incentives for people to break the rules so what keeps them committed?

One thing that Ostrom points to in successful examples is that monitoring and sanctions for breaking rules are not done by external authorities; but rather, these are done by users of the resource themselves—often by appointing designated people to enforce. There are also rewards or benefits for those who catch rule breakers.

What holds all of this together is the shared reality they are in. It would not work if it was externally forced on them. Users of the resource willingly submit themselves to this because they all share in the benefits and all suffer if the system fails. This is why the enforcer/monitor being one of them is so important. They aren't separate from the system, their fate is entwined with it. It's why they often show leniency in certain situations for first time infractions, seeing themselves in the culprit while also coming down harshly on repeat offenders whose actions threaten the whole.

People need to feel a sense of ownership to the system. They have to trust that it's serving everyone's best interest and that everyone else is committed to it. They need to feel that they have a say in shaping it if and when something needs to change. It cannot be put upon them, it must feel like they are choosing it.

Last week, a family member shared a sermon with me that they thought I would like. It was all about reclaiming the Christian practice of hospitality as a response to the increased loneliness in society and how the church should be a space that welcomes lost and broken people in. While I agree with this as a starting place, I can't help but feel it didn't go far enough.

I wrote about hospitality in my essay exploring how the church can better relate to the labour rights movement (working together for a mutual flourishing). Key to this is that the church is not meant to be solely the givers of hospitality, but the recipients of it as well.

As we have been discussing thus far, a truly common good requires the mutual flourishing of a diverse relational network of people within a shared context. Yet the complexities of those relationships are often what stand in the way of making this possible. As stated earlier, these relationships are made up of a conflicting web of families, friendships, neighbours, strangers, and enemies. For the church to step into this web in hopes of advocating for an alternative vision for society, it needs a posture that can build partnerships across these differences without diminishing them. For Luke Bretherton, the answer is found in the traditional Christian practice of hospitality; the intentional act of welcoming strangers. He writes that true hospitality “involves listening to and learning from strangers, as this entails forming a relationship with those not like us that we disagree with or find scandalous.” Thus, there is always a risk to hospitality as it requires a willingness to let go of our preconceptions and assumptions of how things ought to go. When we listen to and learn from those who are unlike ourselves we are necessarily changed. Importantly, hospitality is also something that the church can both give and receive. This is a theme that Cavanough picks up in an essay on mobility and how the church might consider how it ‘moves’ through the world. He offers two metaphors, those of pilgrim and monk, as a way for the church to see itself both as those who travel in solidarity with others, receiving hospitality along the way; and as those who remain in place, offering hospitality to others. That second one, the role of monk, invites the church to work with others to “build strong local communities and cooperative social arrangements deeply rooted in their places.” In this sense, hospitality itself becomes a form of common good that works across our differences to build more welcoming communities. It also helps us resist the assumption that we encounter each other as equals, teaching us to pay greater awareness to the relational imbalances that exist.

This isn't meant to be a criticism towards the sermon, more to say that I think for the church to have a healthy relationship to the surrounding society it needs to not see itself only as having something to offer—but also a humility to learn and be equally changed as it builds relationships for the mutual flourishing of our world.

In the Maintenance of Everything (1), Stewart Brand quotes Matthew Crawford on motorcycle repair,

“Any mechanic will tell you that it is invaluable to have other mechanics around to test your reasoning against, especially if they have a different intellectual disposition.” (Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft)

I've been sitting with this since I read it a couple weeks ago, with it sort of mulling around in the back of my head—unsure what, if anything to do with it. Then I recently saw a Guardian article mention that Gen Z will be the last generation to experience human-to-human intimacy exclusively, meaning from this point on human-to-AI relationships will become more common. In fact, as the article notes, the AI companion industry is set to reach $31B by 2032. Companions, therapists, thought partners, coworkers. AI is slowly taking over all these previously human-only spaces. It's gentrifying intimacy.

But coming back to Crawford's point, there is something irreplaceable about surrounding yourself with people engaged in the same craft as you. And what I have been stirring over and over about this is that it's fundamentally different than simply having someone to bounce ideas off of. How dismissive that would be of the other people, each of whom come into that space with their own problems, solutions, expertise, and opinions. The value of having them around is that they are wholly separate from you and can see things from perspectives that you cannot. They can—and should—and will—disagree with you. And we're all better for it.,

Hannah Arendt described the public realm as a table, that gathers yet separates us. A table is common, yet allows us to retain our individuality while we sit around it. The value of a healthy public life is that it brings together those who see and hear from different perspectives. The collapsing of this would be like reducing us to disconnected entities with a singular point of view. A good description, perhaps, of our present society.

Human connection is friction. It slows things down, requires making time and space for each other. It's also mutual, sharing and listening equally. And it changes us, challenging our self centred perspectives to see things from a different angle. The hard work is the point. It's messy, inconvenient, and it's an irreplaceable part of being human.

I finished reading Sharon Bala's new novel, Good Guys this week. It's about the rise and fall of a fictional global aid charity based out of Toronto called Children of the World; but more than that, it's about what it means to do charity under capitalism. The story is very familiar—in that it feels pulled right out of real life. And as someone who works in the charitable sector, I found it stirring a lot of unsettling questions within me.

At the core of novel is the question, can we do good in a broken system? And I appreciate that Bala seems to not be trying to offer any clean answers to that question. She explores it from several different angles, people with the best intentions coming to the realization that their efforts may just be making things worse. As one of the characters in the novel, a journalist and writer asks, "It feels like the harder I try to do the right thing, the more I fail. Is it even possible to do good when the system is rigged for so much bad?"

In an interview with Mattea Roach on the CBC Bookends podcast, Bala was asked directly whether or not she thinks its possible to do this sort of work ethically and her answer really stuck out to me:

“I think it is, but I also think it's really easy to unintentionally do harm. And this is something that I also grapple with. I mean, I think one thing is just to actually not assume that you know what's best for other people, but to listen to what they say they need.”

There's an interesting thread around religion in this book and a lot of it is extremely cynical. The founder of the charity is a former Christian rock star and there are other characters with Christianity in their past. However, one thing that I noted was that one of the few characters who doesn't seem to be implicated in Bala's critique is a missionary priest. He's just working in the country running a simple church, trying to care for the people as best as he can. In fact, when the journalist character (who feels like a bit of an avatar for Bala herself) asks the question about whether or not its possible to do good, she asks it to this priest. Who responds, "no, but we have to try." And then when she jokes about what Jesus would do in this situation, he answers, "overturn the tables."

Rick Tobias once told me that a lot of big philanthropy gifts would often come with a reluctance or a policy around giving to faith-based organizations. He said that he would tell them that this is mistake, ignoring that spirituality is often a real part of life for people living in poverty. You're not listening if you're dismissing their faith as naive or somehow less important than other needs. And while that's not meant to exonerate the harm that many faith-based orgs have done (and still do), it is to say that it can be equally presumptuous to claim that religion has no place in meeting the needs of people experiencing poverty.

This is where I appreciate Bala's no easy answers approach and her focus that the only real way out of this mess is untangling it all from capitalism's deep hooks.

"When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.”

Earlier this year I picked up Steward Brand's, The Maintenance of Everything Part 1 and am finally setting some time aside to read it. For the longest time, maintenance was something that felt very unappealing to me. I've never felt like my interest held up for the long haul. But I've been thinking quite a bit over the last few years about craft and the generational loss of skills. As I get older, I am increasingly frustrated by my lack of ability to do things that previous generations could. I am trying, in small ways, to reclaim these skills where I can.

What I am paying attention to, however, is that the loss of these skills isn't entirely our fault. It is the slow and steady result of many coalescing factors. Yes, some of these of our own making—like our declining attention spans in the age of digital distraction—but others are foisted on us, such as the manufactured obsolescence in many of the products we buy.

I appreciate that there seems to be a growing movement of tackling both sides of this. The right to repair fight is helping push for systemic change while things like repair cafes and other pop ups are aimed at helping people reclaim the skills to care for the things they own.