Purity of mind and salvation through libraries? Wise words from a local broadsheet

One of the often overlooked but perhaps critical functions of the civic knowledge space provided by public libraries and most famously celebrated by German social philosopher Juergen Habermas is the assembly of local, often transient, publications. One such, a free broadsheet published from the local University of Toronto campus, was recently discovered by a Beyond Librarianship supporter in the Mississauga Public Library, near Toronto. It's called Commuting and draws on the ambiguity of its title word's simultaneous reference to proliferating transit behaviours and the reduction of decrees, often criminal sanctions. Commuting asks how do we reconcile current society's consumerism with our resulting desperate need for reduction, most acutely conservation of our natural environment. 

From a medieval saint can our salvation come? "Sister Water", one article of several like-minded in Commuting, cites "Canticle of the Sun", a song, legend has it, sung on his deathbed by St. Francis of Assisi, he of medieval sainthood. For article author Andrea Muehlebach the song asks "what it would mean to think of the world outside of the paradigm of the private and the proprietary." True to their founder's beliefs Franciscans observed a radical renunciation of possessions.   

In 2018, disenchantment with major 20th century economic models that collapsed spectacularly in 1989, and then in 2008 (the year of the "Great Recession"), continues, and the commons idea validated by Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom seeps into more and more debates. But in this post-millennial epoch simply proclaiming the increasingly acknowledged ideal of the commons, which inevitably speaks clearly to some but not to others, is not society's most urgent imperative. Instead, it is more valuable to explain how a commons approach will address the particular problems that confront the world in our still adolescent 21st century.

First and most pressingly since the challenge is universal and potentially catastrophic is, of course, the natural environment. If in times of pre-industrial plenitude renunciation could be seen as a moral/religious reversion to an ideal of saintly fleshlessness, in our later times of hyper-consumptive "economism", where citizens are routinely advised to "go out and shop"  to cure their ills, many would agree that our survival as a planet depends on curbing enthusiasm for stuff. In fact, the now irrefutable evidences of global warning suggest a kind of  lament by the universe itself. As our unprecedented, self-destructive epidemics of diabetes, obesity and auto-immune disease imply, consumerism is not a genetic compulsion of human society. It has been created and promoted by forces that depend on it.

Echoing the "Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge" project designed for popular self-education in the 19th century, according to the masthead Commuting, and its companion UTM broadsheets aim to "foster a deeper public awareness of the complex entanglements of ecologies of excess, environmental legacies of colonialism, the financialization of weather, contemporary catastrophism, politics of  sustainability, climate justice and hopeful resilience." If we see the above explosion of "polysyllabism" as an ironic commentary on the ills of uncontrolled materialism then the solution is simple in principle: a few short words - use and return instead of consuming. The solution  sounds a loThe t like a library.

A trust-based "loaner-ship" relationship with the world, as long enshrined in libraries, is arguably better than ownership, a form of the enclosure that has defined modern society since the 18th century. It is the only way of preserving our commons, the only one we have. A social economy where what we use is conserved by returning it as it is, or as equivalent social value, is the necessary institutional instrument to achieve the sustainable world now routinely celebrated by most responsible citizens and their leaders. Until this becomes a societal norm instead of the discretionary option of a few we will continue to experience pollution and depletion. Worker empowerment, consumer transparency, environmental conservation and community partnership, are the societal values recognized and celebrated by TorontotheBetter though our directory and communications. We call on more enterprises to embody them in their operations.             

Congratulations to University of Toronto Mississauga for the social engagement represented by their Diffusion of Useful Knowledge series and thanks to the friend of TorontotheBetter who introduced us to it. To maximize the diffusion of this useful knowledge we encourage those able to see and read it to loan it to others.