Is Conservation Love?

I am sure regular readers of the blog will be aware that I am a fan of the work of Clay Shirky, as both an internet theoretician (if that actually exists as an activity) and as an orator, he has a remarkable talent for making complex ideas simple and interesting.

I was particularly struck by this video I watched recently on youtube, in which he used the act of conservation, and love, as a metaphor. Discussing the ancient Ise Shinto shrine, a shrine made of wood, which is periodically torn down and replaced, and although the material is never more than 20 years old the Monks quite rightly consider the Shrine to be original. Shirky made the comment “UNESCO said roughly; get out of our face with that 1300 year old stuff”. Which to my mind, nicely summarises the traditional conservation standpoint around physical structure being the only significant part of the material cultural record. Or, as Clay Shirky summarises this opinion with the phrase: “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process”.

Okihiki Festival showing the wood to be used to build the next shrine. (May 2007)

Shirky’s reason for introducing this topic in such a way is to provide a metaphor for understanding the role of new technologies in society, in the case of this discussion he focuses on the programming language PERL and an experience he had with AT&T as a client. He talks of the ‘techie hello’ that of an argument between programming languages in this case AT&T’s very own C++ and his groups who were Perl hackers. He describes how the AT&T guys thought they had the perl guys on the ropes with the issue of support. In answer to the Perl guys they said: “we get our support from the perl community, and from the look on their faces it was as if we’d told them we get our Thursdays from a banana.” In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this system they sent out a moderately complex question to the community list, and received an answer by the end of the meeting. However, it was, according to Clay Shirky, at this point that he realised what was going on, as he says: “They didn’t care that they had already seen it work in practice, because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory.” In other words for them support meant a contract, with a company. It is here that he returns to the metaphor to say: “Perl is a Shinto shrine. Perl exists not as an edifice but as an act of love” and continued to talk about Perl hackers saying “they love perl, but more importantly, they love one another in the context of Perl.” His metaphor is that the tools we have now turn love into a renewable building material, much like the wood of the shrine. In so doing he suggests that for predicting successful futures it would be better to ask not ‘what is the business model’ but ‘do the people who like it take care of each other’. He amusingly suggests that the priests at the shrine “Would totally get Linux. Linux gets rebuilt, every night, by people who’s principle goal is that it continues to exist the following morning.”

These are systems that involve the use of community rather than institution, they involve the free sharing of information amongst users, for the love of it, rather than the buying and selling of knowledge. It seems to me that this is an interesting comment on society, today, we are increasingly seeing process become more important than edifice, and this is also true in conservation, where today, the old UNESCO position is no more, and the intangible meanings of material culture are taken to be as significant as the tangible; often more so. Clay Shirky concluded his talk by saying that: “in the past we would do little things for love, but, big things, big things required money, now we can do big things for love.”

In so doing then, I’d like to conclude by asking the question, are conservators learning to love? And what big things will we do with that love?