A complicated drama over this question is now playing out among museums, governments, art dealers, collectors and citizens of various countries. The title of an article in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books (May 14) states the controversy succinctly: “Who Should Own the World’s Antiquities?” The piece, by Hugh Eakin, raises fascinating questions about the rationale for ownership of priceless objects from bygone civilizations.

Should they belong to the countries that now occupy those lands, and if so, what responsibilities does the government have in its stewarship of the artworks? Or do the antiquities belong to a museum that acquired them indirectly through their nations’ wars and other imperial adventures centuries ago? Or perhaps the sculptures and jewelry should be seen as something that belongs to all of humanity, now and in the future: the cultural patrimony of the human species.

For the past several decades, governments in Egypt, Italy, China, Turkey and other nations have claimed that they are the proper owners of the many antiquities that have been dug up on their lands. These governments argue that they represent the people of their nations, and are the inheritors of anything that previous civilizations on their territories produced. They argue, moreover, that current inhabitants of the nation – say, Italians – have a cultural identification with Michelangelo’s sculptures and Pompeii frescos, which is said to justify government ownership of the artifacts, on behalf of all Italians.

Photo by Sebastià Geralt,, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license. Image from a drinking cup (kylix) depicting an athlete with discus. Late Archaic Period, about 500 B.C. Painter: Douris. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Here’s where the drama comes in: in point of fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the British Museum, the Getty, and many others are the actual owners of countless antiquities. The antiquities were often acquired through military conquest, purchases from looters, and other imperial adventures. I was in the Metropolitan Museum recently, and was astounded at the breadth of artworks from Egypt. How would I feel if I were an Egyptian?

Prior to 1970, a fairly lax allocation of ownership rights prevailed. Nation-states in the Mediterranean and the Middle East tended to allocate the treasures dug up on their territory through a system known as partage. The host countries authorized museums to carry out major archaeological digs and take a certain portion of their finds for themselves, while the countries would keep a considerable collection of the spoils as well.

But as nationalism swept through many countries following World War II, governments demanded stricter control over antiquities found in their soil. Eventually, in 1970, UNESCO established a convention that prohibits the export of antiquities without the consent of governments. The works are formally considered the cultural property of those governments and peoples.

Under the UNESCO rules, a work’s provenance became important in establishing its legitimacy on the art market. To get around the rules, a black market flourished as looters furtively excavated and exported more antiquities, which they sold to art dealers, who “sanitized the works’ provenance and then sold to the world’s major museums. This arrangement has enraged not just the “archeological countries” of the world but also serious archaeologists, who regard the location and context of an excavated object as crucial in establishing its cultural and historical significance. Without this knowledge, a beautiful urn is just a beautiful urn. (Museums have tended to diminish or dismiss the concerns of archeologists.)

It is a sign of the shifting tides that governments in archeological territories have in recent years demanded the “repatriation” of antiquities taken from their lands decades or centuries ago. This has triggered a number of high-profile cases in which ownership of a rare, iconic object – e.g., the Euphonious krater – becomes a major international controversy.

Hugh Eakin’s article spends a great deal of time critiquing two new books, Who Owns Antiquity? by James Cuno, and Whose Culture? by Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both argue that the “encyclopedic museums” such as the Met and the British Museum are stewards of the world’s cultural heritage and advocates for an enlightened, transnational cosmopolitanism.

They also argue that their museums’ superior resources make them better custodians of priceless antiquities, because objects repatriated to Turkey or Iraq, for example, are often not well-protected. The museums also point out, correctly, that national ownership laws restricting the excavation and export of antiquities have in fact pushed a great deal of the antiquities trade underground.

Cuno goes even further to make the bold claim, “Why should state sovereignty determine ownership?” He calls for an “international trusteeship [of antiquities] under the auspices of a nongovernmental agency.” It sounds appealing in the abstract. But in practice, the scheme sounds like a way for the encyclopedic museums to be free to keep on on collecting whatever they want, without restriction. Their rationale: We’re doing it on behalf of all humanity.

There are many complex arguments to be made that I cannot repeat here. Suffice it to say that Hugh Eakin makes a good case that permanent ownership by museums may be a less effective way to promote cosmopolitianism and international cooperation than the new system of loans and sharing that is now emerging. Paradoxically, as more governments and museums rally around a new set of norms about “ownership,” it is fostering greater lending of antiquities for specific exhibits. People from “archeological nations” can see a more diverse array of the world’s antiquities than otherwise, and so can cosmopolitans in New York and London.

The new regime is also focusing attention on the most urgent priority — to protect antiquities from disappearing into private collections or physically deteriorating. Eakin’s piece leaves me thinking a heretical thought: Perhaps ownership is less significant than the ongoing economy of gift-exchange relationships that is developing among institutions that truly care about antiquities.

All of this was brought home clearly in a provocative lecture that I attended yesterday evening. It was called “No Time to Think,” by David M. Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. Levy gave a chilling historical overview of how American society has become enslaved to an ethic of “more-better-faster” and is losing touch with the capacity for reflection and intuitive thinking. In an overweening commitment to constant doing and making, analyzing and thinking (which, let us note, are important human activities), we can too easily close off access to an entire realm of consciousness that is at least as important, our capacity for reflection.

Photo by alicepopkorn, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial license.

Levy’s research is focused on why the technological devices that are designed to connect us also seem to radically dis-connect us. As Levy puts it, “We now have the most remarkable tools for teaching and learning the world has ever known. How is it that we have less time to think than ever before?” Although our society supposedly prizes creative thought, it in fact gives little respect to the intuitive and the contemplative.

The “information society” has a certain frenetic mindlessness to it, one that takes Henry David Thoreau’s famous line in Walden to a new level entirely: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Twitter may be all the rage, but surely there is something pathetic about the ascendance of Twittering as our unstructured, person-to-person social time dwindles away.

This trend has only accelerated, and become more internalized, as more and more digital technologies have become incorporated into our daily routines. Email, cell phones, text-messaging, voicemail, Facebook, instant-messaging, Twitter, and of course the World Wide Web – they all serve useful roles. But I also realize at times that the digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships.

According to Thomas Eriksen of the University of Oslo, author of Tyranny of the Moment, the electronic environment systematically favors “fast time” activities that require instant, urgent responses (email, cell phone calls, etc.) Such stimuli tend to crowd out “slow time activities” such as “reflection, play and long-term love relationships,” said Levy.

Levy pointed out that this dynamic has an especially perverse effect in academia, which is supposed to be somewhat insulated from the larger society so that students and scholars can think more broadly and with longer range perspectives. But in fact, universities mirror the rest of society, and the dwindling time to think is as much a problem within the academy as anywhere else. As instrumental, short-term, applied goals take center-stage, our society has less access to the wisdom and complexity that deep, reflective thinking can provide. This is a major loss.

The ancients had a word for it: “leisure.” In the original sense of the word, leisure was not a consumer-oriented activity like golfing or movie-going, or even “relaxation.” It involved having time to ponder and reflect on the world. The words “school” and “scholar” have their etymological roots in the Greek and Latin words for these activities, Levy noted.

According to Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, “leisure is a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still cannot hear.” Pieper, writing in the 1940s, worried about a world of “total work” that would make a “total claim upon the whole of human nature.”

It’s safe to say that that future has arrived. The very coinage of the term 24/7 and “real time” (usually as a virtue!) confirms the ubiquitous social reality of “total work.” Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process.

By coincidence, this week’s issue of The New Yorker has a major article by Margaret Talbot on the use of “neuro-enhancing drugs” that are increasingly being taken to boost one’s cognitive performance. There is apparently a large underground culture of people – students, business executives, poker players and others seeking a competitive mental edge – who take drugs like Adderall and modafinil to stay awake, alert and mentally engaged, especially for tasks that require sustained attention. The whole idea is to prolong one’s productivity and efficiency.

Taking drugs to prolong one’s productive engagement becomes a new way adapt one’s very body and mind to modern demands for “efficiency.” Why remain a normal human being when one can use chemicals to super-charge one’s metabolism in order to meet the harsh imperatives of a college education, business negotiations, international travel and general multitasking? Defenders liken the neuro-enhancing drugs to drinking coffee. But that’s a rationalization; no one really knows how safe these productivity boosters are over the long term.

The scary things is that we are slowly “papering over” the forms of human consciousness that we regard as gratuitous….yet which history has shown are essential to a meaningful life. We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves.

Yet this is no Brave New World imposed by a totalitarian state; we are “voluntarily” doing it to ourselves. While there is certainly a voluntary aspect to using neuro-enhancing drugs, in other respects our cultural norms of efficiency and busyness are encouraging this abuse. When your everyday life is saturated by email, cell phones, voicemail and texting, it’s not a big leap to take a drug that will help you survive the “fast-time” norms of modern life.

In his lecture, David Levy called for an “information environmentalism” to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives: advertising, telemarketing, junk mail, radio and TV, and various digital media. Perhaps we can begin to push back on the cognitive overload, he suggested, and recover some modicum of silence. That’s the purpose of the “Do Not Call” list to prevent unsolicited telemarketing calls, for example.

We might also begin to design physical spaces with contemplative needs in mind (think of the Library of Congress’ reading room, for example). Many businesses have discovered that they can make money by offering consumers the opportunity to “buy back” the quiet that has been taken from us. The Bose noise-canceling headphones are marketed in this fashion.

I liked how Levy put it: “We need the equivalent of old-growth forests and marshlands in our mental lives.”

For more about David Levy’s work on the topic of information overload and the need to recover contemplative mind, it’s worth chasing down a special issue of the journal Ethics and Information Technology that Levy guest-edited in December 2007 (vol. 9, no. 4). Entitled “Information, Silence and Sanctuary,” the issue contains six thoughtful essays on a topic that deserves far more awareness. Unfortunately, the journal is locked behind a paywall, so you may be university access to read it. Another person worth consulting is Ivan Illich, who wrote about silence as a commons.

Given the powerful economic forces that have a self-interest in colonizing our consciousness (marketers routinely talk about seizing “mindshare”), devising effective ways to protect our contemplative consciousness is going to be a formidable challenge indeed. But on the other hand, this is not a struggle we can avoid. The alternative is a jittery, jagged postmodern insanity.

One three-minute segment looks at the challenge that online commons pose to Centralized Media, especially commercial journalism. Another segment explores the growing tensions between the marketplace and the commons, but also the potential synergies of the two realms working together. As Bollier notes, “We’re caught in this transition zone between those who want to stave off the future and those who are embracing it and trying to innovate with it.”

A third segment explores the counterintuitive idea of online businesses making money by giving something away for free. Examples range from open platforms like Google and Yahoo to IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux to sports equipment makers collaborating with communities of xtreme sports enthusiasts.

A final, seven-minute video provides an overview of the key theme of Bollier’s book – the role of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, educators, entrepreneurs and many others in building the software platforms, legal licenses and social ethic for managing their own online commons.

Videos are now available of Bollier’s presentations to the Aspen Institute and the New America Foundation. Bollier continues his book tour next week with appearances at the Open Knowledge Conference in London and the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University.