28. Someone who eats the acorns he picked up under an
oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the forest,
has certainly appropriated them to himself! Nobody can deny
that the nourishment is his. Well, then, when did they begin
to be his?
when he digested them?
when he cooked them?
when he brought them home?
when he picked them up ·under the tree·?
It is obvious that if his first gathering didn’t make them his,
nothing else could do so. That labour marked those things
off from the rest of the world’s contents; it added something
to them beyond what they had been given by nature, the
common mother of all; and so they became his private right.
Suppose we denied this, and said instead:
He had no right to the acorns or apples that he thus
appropriated, because he didn’t have the consent of
all mankind to make them his. It was robbery on his
part to take for himself something that belonged to all
men in common.
If such a consent as that was necessary, men in general
would have starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had
provided them with.
It appears to me that Locke is appealing to a "common reason" here, assuming that people will be able to see the truth in his arguments. So he is already assuming a far greater commonality of human intention and purpose and only then bestowing this on property. Without such commonality then his arguments for property would just be ignored. If people are equipped with the ability to perceive the truth in Locke's arguments, then in fact they don't need his arguments. When they pick the apple from the tree they are at liberty to decide what it means and why they did it without resorting to arguments like "property."
Creating arguments about what "individuals" do is fundamentally flawed. Arguing an "individual" has a right is pointless. If we are individuals let us decide for ourselves. In fact all arguments, all interactions like this blog are social. There is, before we even begin to think, a society. So we can't base "individual property" upon individuals like Locke does, because individuals are not the root entity. And such an argument is circular anyway. Locke starts with a world of individuals, who then own themselves and then argues that they own other things according to the actions of those bodies is pointless. A castle in the sky.
If anything it is the other way around and the existence of property in our society is the foundation of individuality! For perspective lets look at some other societies.
In ancient Greece society was organised according to the Polis. While Greeks felt some shared identity, especially after the defeat of the Persians, each Polis was independent with its own laws and customs. I believe, but have no evidence yet, that the Poleis were roughly equally divided between those with private property and those with more shared ownership. Obviously Athens was property based, and the enduring battle in Athens was between the democratic people and the ruling aristocrats who owned everything. Two and a half millennia later we still struggle with that exact same unresolved problem.
Historically property is not essential and for all Locke and his contemporary writers arguments, it is not absolutely defensible. I believe it is no more than a dominant feature of a particular society.
In animals there are two types of property (1) the type Locke was arguing for (2) territory. When squirrels come to my bird feeding station there is no Lockean property or "Lockean proviso" they simply take what they want, and where there is conflict the larger or the most hungry fights for control of the resource, and that is even individuals from the same family. If they could squirrels would happily open the stomachs of their fellows and take part digested food. This is not a "political system" it is sheer mechanical reality, no more intelligent than rain drops finding the easiest way down a window pane. There is no "reason" here just an observation of mechanics. (2) territory is similar to 1, but is not so ad hoc. It is the development of a strategy to secure "rights" to a resource. It can lead to the evolution of special characteristics like antlers in deer used to engage in often quite specialised rituals and contests. Such behaviour is usually for breeding rights, most commonly males competing for rights to the resource of females.
1 & 2 above are only loosely separated. When squirrels come to the feeding station we do not see the continual battles that occur between them so that they each know who is dominant. Even the birds do the same, creating a literal "pecking order" although it is much harder to notice and has only recently been studied properly.
In this sense all animals have always battled for rights to access to resources. Mostly ad hoc but sometimes creating distinct territories and often using very stylised and ritualised contents. We can hardly call this property though as Property suggests some kind of reasonable, legal agreement. But I'm actually going to argue that property IS territory. I wrote about this before. Human systems based on property are the least developed and inherit the system of territory so widespread in nature.
Post getting long and as usual I have not addressed the main point yet: Apple Trees other than to rubbish Locke.
Locke is right that God presents us with almost everything we need, from sunlight to air to rain to apple trees. But we are not stones passively accepting the action of the world - the tortoise while like a stone must actively breathe and eat. Even at rest I too must breathe and actively take the air into my lungs. The tree may grow a wonderful crop of apples all by itself, but at some point I need to move those apples to my mouth and digestion in order to live. There is a necessary process of sustaining ourselves that Locke quite rightly identifies. In the post about Destiny this is very much the issue:
How much is given and how much do we take
That is the most basic question of Economics.
It is interesting that "take" and "make" are so similar in English. In my Lockean analysis here they are the same. If I was to "make" a lunch from apples I would "take" them from the tree and lay them out. My work and my craft is essentially "taking" from "nature". If I was to plough a field and sow apple seeds to grow the orchard I would be taking the land over to my wishes. Perhaps it is harder for the watch maker: but he is taking the metals and the components, and the training of his mentors, and the history of watch making and all its inventions (the shoulders on which he stands). He is taking all that to produce a new watch.
Quite different from Locke's analysis there is no focus on property here, there is rather the void left when we take materials and change them into something else. Even the apple we eat will end up as carbon dioxide, energy and waste materials we will excrete. Using Newton's second Law all our taking is matched with giving. The watch maker takes things, and gives a watch.
If there is property here it is in the action of taking and giving. Locke might argue we cannot give what is not ours, and we can't take what is not ours.
I wanted to explore this situation first though. My main issue with all the existing discourse is it misses all the details. Suppose we are walking and we see a hungry deer trying to reach an apple. We reach up take the apple and give it to the deer. Nothing wrong in my language there. But is Locke suggesting that I took ownership of the apple when I plucked it and the gave ownership to the deer? Did the apple tree itself have ownership before I took the apple? What nonsense. I saw a hungry deer and simply offered myself as the means by which it could reach the apple. Some might say I developed a "desire" to help the deer and that desire involved taking the apple, so I did desire the apple for myself which I then desired to give to the deer. So Locke likes to say I took ownership for a while in order to fulfil my wishes. But we could also just say that I gave myself to be a tool for the deer to eat. In fact that latter is very much the power of humans, and the freedom that we have. There seems an insistence in Western thinking to add some much extraneous metaphysics that simply isn't there. We in the West must feel weighed down by the burden of metaphysics we must carry with us just to live in this society! I think of a Jew I met once who seemed to live every moment of his life carrying the burden of being a Jew. No less Westerners: it is no less a burden!
So yes we can be channels through which things flow. I can be a helpful member of the team, own nothing, and let the activities and processes of the team be what I am.
So when I am hungry and I see the apple on the tree I do not need to own it in order to take it. I do not need to enter into any contract with the world to take it. But -- and this is where my initial observation about Locke comes in -- I am already part of a society and world. When I take it I am most probably not just thinking of myself but probably others. Perhaps I may take 2 apples: 1 for myself and one for my friend. Or perhaps I may throw one to the timid deer with her fawn in the under growth. Who knows what I will do and why. That is the freedom of being a living thing. Why do we need ownership here?
Taking this thought experiment even further. Perhaps if I sit under the tree long enough a passing crow may peck down an apple for me. It unknowingly becomes the channel through which the apple passes from the tree to myself. Do we say that the crow took possession?
It seems to me we need go into the messy Western philosophy of soul. The tree and the crow and the deer cannot take possession because they do not have a soul. Possession is taken by things that have a soul. This is an important realisation because this is the root problem at the heart of current economics. We know there is no soul, and yet the whole edifice of Western society is based upon it. Nature because it is soulless is outside Western consciousness.
And now we know we are dealing with things that have a soul what when two things with a soul want one commodity? In Western society "property" is the idea that resolves such "conflict". In our society the owner of the land on which the apple tree grows gets to decide. Even if you pick the apple, you do not own it in the West. You may not even know that the land was owned: such information is hidden away in scrolls in legal document store houses. In times not so long ago you would be put into hard labour if you took such an apple! And if you took it from Royal land you could be killed. So much for Locke's arguments about possession and ownership! Until very recently at sea there was no punishment for not helping people, but there was for not saving property! In the West property is more important than people. What a ridiculous joke that Locke should try to underpin
property with arguments involving common people! So much for "The Enlightenment"!!
The problem we face is never-the-less conflict. When two people find an apple there is a good chance they may start to fight if it is worth it and the stronger will take control of the resource. Scale this up and you have all the wars in history where one alliance tries to crush another alliance of people. We have that right now as the West seeks to reestablish their control of the Middle East and destroy ISIS. Where we drew the borders of the Middle East a century ago we will not allow other people to do the same.
If we are to have a successful new economics its main challenge is to find a system where conflict can be resolved better than what we have at the moment (which is rich elites controlling the masses).
And to do that we need resolve what power will enforce the system.
Locke was appealing to Reason to justify property that already existed. Property that was already protected by a powerful army and legal system. And he used educated argument and writing that would have been only available to the very landed gentry that owned everything significant anyway. This is what property is usually taken to be: the system by which the powerful maintain theft from the poor. That would be essentially my analysis of it too. That is what Capitalism at root is.
Similar to Locke we could argue, like in this blog, for people to gain faith in some system. A change in culture that like an eddy in the river once begun might maintain itself. Children learning from their parents how it works, and possibly (though this is least important with culture) why it is good to do things like this.
Alternatively we could have a democratic force that would use power to remove elitists and threats to the system. But as has been seen in Communism such a revolutionary council can quickly become the problem.
Perhaps the New Economics cannot emerge like an alternative to Vertebrates and Arthropods over night. Revolutions start fast, and end fast. Any thing lasting must evolve from what we have, and potentially that will limit what we can achieve. But for the sake of understanding and "what if" i'll explore what options exist to what we currently have even if no practical path can be plotted between what we have and what we would like.
No comments:
Post a Comment