Property, The Language

Before the ideas of private property and ownership can be profitably discussed a nomenclatural issue must be addressed: ‘property’ is a word like the word ‘slave.’. One cannot discuss slavery with clarity using only the word slave for those in bondage; the word assumes a subservient position or worse, the inherent denial of fully human status.  If the argument is not allowed to ask, “Is it right to hold human beings against their desire in conditions defined only by the other human beings doing the holding? Is it right that those humans held in bondage be required to do whatever they are told with physical abuse and death as consequences?”, then how is the argument to be made?  To say that a slave is held in bondage is a tautology; to use the word slave in the above questions is an inherent acceptance of the condition.  Calling a human object a slave is very different than calling him or her an independent person. 

Consider for a moment how the status of ‘human being’ is changed by using the word and idea of slave.  The US Constitution defined slaves as 3/5ths of a person – a remarkable assertion on its face.  In the American south slaves were tallied along with the livestock and often thought of and treated similarly; it was the general assumption that slaves were inferior to full humans in most ways.  Male slaves were ‘boys’ or ‘bucks’ and never called or considered as men.  It has been generally true that slaves could have their lives taken from them at the whim of those who claimed to hold them in bondage.  Try substituting human being for slave in those statements. The word slave did not cause these relationships, but supported them [1]. 

Property is a similar word.  We seldom consider its implications or even to what it might refer.  It is not difficult today to see that a human being held in bondage may have options in behaviors and desires other than those of the master; most, today, realize that to deny those options and desires in another, purely for one’s own desires and benefit, is wrong.  But we don’t see that a piece of land may exist in ecological relationship with adjoining land, that the functional relationships of ecological cycles, nutrient movement, water purification, living relationships of hundreds, thousands, even millions of organisms are part and parcel of that land.  Much of what we call ‘property’ is its own thing, has its own existence and relationships with a functioning biosphere.  

It is not that these are obscure relationships.  They are easy to see and understand, but we have allowed language to cover them, and in our desires for ease and excess we rationalize them; just as slaveholders rationalized holding other fully human individuals in bondage to support their own desires for economic and social achievement.  

That slaves might be fully human and deserving of all human rights of self-determination was incomprehensible to all but a few white Americans in 1860.  That much of what we call and treat as property today should and must be left to its own functioning ecological relationships is just as incomprehensible to most of us.  And again the language makes seeing reality more difficult; we will never get to an appropriate understanding using present language and attendant comprehensions. 

Furthermore, once ‘property’ is established as an unquestioned concept, its ‘privatizing’ is an adaptive outcome, that is, if it is property, then it can be assigned to individual humans and be used in their exclusive interests.  Accepting and using these terms makes arguments opposing such views – and thus real understanding – impossible. 

Again as with slavery, an economic system has become seemingly utterly dependent on a conceptual framework that must be challenged; the language of property gives the continuation of the present framework great momentum and persuasive force.  I apologize in advance (and retrospectively) for some of the seemingly tortured reasonings as I try to construct an appropriate approach to language and conceptual frame out of the even more twisted but wholly absorbed reasonings that we take today for the natural order. 

First and foremost it needs to be realized that the way humans, as a species and as individuals, relate to the objects, processes and spaces of the world around us are adaptations, not finalities that we are in the process of perfecting.  All actions are related to the consequences that follow from them.  That we have come to see the objects and spaces around us as only extensions of our needs has dangerously narrowed and dimmed our vision of the world. 

If our powers to control and dominate the world were as limited as they are for other species, then the fullest demonstration of our power would be, as it is for all other species, completely overshadowed by the vastness, depth and completeness of ecological action [2].  But we are like 4 year-olds with fully automatic machine guns in a glass factory – it has been right to say that we require inhibitions on our behaviors; we need our superstitions, mores, rules, commandments, regulations, laws.  However, the way that we have come to these controls on our incredible powers has been haphazard, and hazard has been the result. 

We have not done such a bad job of designing ways of living that work for some groups and individuals – not such a good job either considering the poverty and suffering in the world – but for larger concentrations of power in institutions like religions, governments and corporations, the limitations and restrictions are almost nonexistent.  To a very large extent this fact has driven and been driven by the very narrow and simplistic view that humans have come to take of the objects, processes and spaces of this world. 

We have created the conception that we can do anything that we think of and wish to any object or place, that only other humans and their wishes need to be considered, and that this is often a power relation; opportunity and action goes to who can bully or fight with the greatest effectiveness.  Objects and spaces that are within our region of power are said to be controlled by us, that we can do with them as we will.  The relationships of objects and spaces to other functioning systems have typically been ignored as irrelevant since the responses of those systems to our actions have been so slow compared to our almost instantaneous speeds; that these systems respond glacially, in both meanings, slowly and overwhelmingly, is only beginning to influence the public mind too long accustom to religious interpretations of the consequences of our actions on the environment. 

The relationship that we call property is really a very narrow interpretation of the objects and spaces so claimed, the idea that an ‘owner’, in the Blackstone sense, can have more than a vanishingly small understanding of the full expression of the object or space is absurd. Yet, without any real understanding of a thing that is called property, the owner claims the right of total domination and the exclusion of all other influences; picks out some characteristics important to the present human condition and uses that characteristic without regard to the consequences to the object or place as a whole. 

Humans, as do all other organisms, need things. They can, with various behaviors and devices, control certain limited aspects of some things.  They can make many things happen with and to much of the world.  What they cannot do is know enough or be powerful enough to be, for more than a short time (evolutionary or ecological time) and with unsteady hand, in control of the world.  Our control up to now has been the control of a home invader, the illusion of control based on an apparent asymmetry of power.  Property is both a consequence of and contributor to that illusion. 

Of course, we must use the world, its objects and places, there are some who use that simple reality to justify our present language and action [3], but there is no inherent reason that we cannot use the world as does the rest of life, the billions of species over billions of years.  Since it is our use of objects and spaces that is ultimately the issue, then it is a use-based understanding that we require. 

While other species also use environmental offerings in selective and narrow ways, their adaptive response systems, based on the genetic consequences of their reproductive success, are responsive to an infinitely broad range of environmental changes.  Biophysical processes in their finest detail – including things about which even today we know nothing – mold and adjust the physiology and behavior of all living things, from bacteria to blue whales.  Such is the nature and function of Living Order evolutionary processes.  Our Consciousness Order adaptive processes are orders of magnitude faster than the evolutionary/geological time frame, allowing us the illusion that we can, and even have, overcome nature.  This illusion is the central source of our difficulties. 

The kind of order that the human species needs and wishes to live in should be the driving motive for how we relate to the world around us rather than having how we live decided by habits of language that force us into narrow conceptions and options of understanding [4].  We need to stop talking about ‘property’; replace that easy and illusory concept with use-based language: not ‘the field is my property’ – that tells us nothing – but rather, ‘I am planting the field with vegetables and some clover.’  

The politics and economics of exclusive property rights need to adjust to the reality of use.  But first, less illusory language and ways of thinking about the use and assignments of space and objects need to begin to invade the public mind.  Without such changes the cycle of ‘concentration of exclusive privilege, then revolutions resetting the egalitarian clock and back to concentration again’ will continue until the world’s ecosystems so tire of our antics that evolutionary process prevails in our serious humbling. 

I have great concern for the suffering that humans would have to endure in such a humbling, but am even more deeply concerned that the damage we are capable of doing to the earth’s living surface as our systems of support fail can only be vaguely imagined, that our most dire projections will fall short of the true devastation of the living order. 

(The other essays in this series: The meaning of Property;   On Property, A Prologue;  Property, The Biology;  Property, The Religion) 

[1] Huck Finn could not accept Jim as a human being until he began to see him as having his own existence and not colored only with the concept of property.  In the same way we must see the full functioning and independent existence of objects, organisms and lands. 

[2] Ecological action is fully embedded in and informed by the Physical and the Living Systems of Order.  If a change in neutrino flux were to shift an environmental stability, that shift would resonate through ecosystems.  If a gene mutation modifies a protein that changes the metabolic efficiency of an organism by 1%, the whole system adjusts to accommodate. 

[3] Butler Shaffer argues that territoriality and resource protection is the biological basis for private property rights.  While I agree with him that there are emotional and behavioral connections spaces and objects, the leap from needing and creating a region of use to total domination of property is a leap into illusion and madness.   

[4] This falls into the ‘easier said than done’ category.  Learning how to live effectively in the world is not even a present goal.   But there are forces gathered and gathering against the eventuality of such a goal since it would involve an honest appraisal of taboo subjects like social justice, inequities of wealth, power and opportunity, nation based murder and many others. 

Walking and Writing at the Same Time:

Delay of Property Essay 

I find that I write the way I walk.  There is a place that I walk in: a great high desert landscape, over 100 square miles of juniper and cactus.  A single gravel dirt road loops through it. A number of car tracks, 2 parallel dirt ruts, run off in various directions and animal trails wander between the places that, for their own reasons, they choose to go.  But all around are vast spaces, like the trackless ocean, that are the place itself.  Only there in the cactus meadows, rocky outcrops, dry washes and cliff faces is the place itself. 

When I first walked there, many years ago, I followed the roads, car tracks and animal trails, but quickly began to venture out into the in-between spaces – soon realizing the arbitrary irrelevance of the established paths, established ways; that there was no understanding, or appreciation, of the place from the roads. 

When walking in the great everywhere I could go anywhere, the roads and tracks were but arbitrary crossings, more about human uses than the place itself.  By wandering across the trackless everywhere I began to know and understand; and also began to understand the roads and tracks as well.  I won’t trouble you with marvelous finds and experiences from beyond the dust-eating loop road, but they are now the place for me, not the clumsy repetitions of the same path through a changing world. 

Many times I would be lost and yet was less lost in the vast spaces than someone on the road who knew where they are going – I may not have known where I was, but I could find my way to everywhere.  The people on the road knew exactly where they were, but could find their way to almost nowhere. 

I have been writing about property and ownership; beginning on the main roads of Locke, Hume and Marx, and then to the 2 rut tracks of Mises, Butler Shaffer, Richard Wilkinson and others.  While walking in the vast spaces in the high desert wildlands I realized that just like understanding this landscape, I was beginning to wander into the untracked spaces of my studies, that there was much more to be experienced and discovered than could be seen from the roads.

I had hoped to have the next essay in the property series posted by now, but it will be a bit longer.  There are some vast spaces to wander in yet before it makes sense to return to the main and possibly arbitrary roads.

Dowd on Palin

Maureen Dowd, in a NYTimes OpEd,  decries the raising of ignorance as laudable, reflecting the present crop of political ignoramuses in Marilyn Monroe’s mirror; Ms. Dowd, uncharacteristically, almost completely misses the salient issue.  Palin, et al, may be ignorant and dismissive of the set of learnings and experiences that Dowd finds important for societies leaders, but Palin and her acolytes have requirements for what to know about, what to believe and how to act that are just as demanding as Dowd’s expectations of familiarity with intellectual classics or established constitutional intention and letter. 

The standards for the Palinestas, since they don’t have a standardized history, are more intuitive – more like the Mean Girl Chic; you know them when you see them.  But, you really do; know them when you see them.  It is in the style of making fun of the expectations of another, expectations that you do not share.  It is in the form of the diminishing attitude toward things that don’t seem important to you personally. 

These behavioral affectations are what are being approved and copied.  It is these affectations that are the source of momentary power over people who come to contest ideas only to find that they have joined a pillow fight with the occasional brick slipped in. 

If the people who do not know and have not read the Bill of Rights were a solid voting block, it would win every election.  If added to those were people who have read the Bill of Rights and perhaps the whole constitution (all ‘one’ page of it), but who don’t remember it in detail – and who don’t understand that almost all of those who claim to know it reread, every time, the sections that they are going to discuss so as to be sure and to reaffirm their understanding – if we add these people, then would be included almost every person except for the most ardent constitutional scholars. 

Anti-intellectualism is the natural product of the use of complexity of ideas to confuse and control people.  But this cannot be simply about not knowing or refusing to know; it must also be about challenging intellectual knowledge with other systems of process and experience – challenging not on playing fields familiar and comfortable to the intellectual experience, rather the creation of fields of play that weaken the power of ‘knowing the answers’ and enhance the power of a particular physical and emotional style. 

Palin is pure style: the bouncy step, the sexually healthy look, the beauty queen intonations, and the cheerleader expression of ideas.  She has the moves of a great wide receiver.  And she understands these things with a depth complementary to Stephan Breyer's understanding of the constitution.  She is not trying to bring people to an understanding of law, economics, political process; she is going to the people’s understanding of being on a winning or losing team, of the far more common experience of high school sports – she even wears the present version of a cheerleader outfit. 

If she wants more than the job of head cheerleader, she is taking a real gamble;  Cheerleaders are not let to play quarterback.  Of course, national politics is not high school football, but it is for Palin and her supporters.  I don’t say this to diminish her or them; the high school sports experience has a much wider and deeper resonance for most Americans than constitutional law and must be considered as part of the political process.  Its rules can be complex and nuanced, and not everyone can bring them under full and competent control. 

If the full variety of the human condition is added to this mix (for example: xenophobia, social dominance drives, sexuality, general fearfulness of the unknown, the limited range of interest to the more or less immediate in time and space), then the power of playing to all these human aspects becomes more clear; and clearly more dangerous.  

Rather than claiming the superiority of intellectual elitism, the argument can be made that people truly need to know about the forces that influence and control their lives.  But, the education required to be even minimally competent in biology, electronics, psychology, economics, history, political science and practical politics, chemistry, physics, math, literature – on and on – is so time consuming and demanding of societal intention that it is not going to happen; and it certainly, even if moved toward, will not happen quickly. 

That people need to know about these things, at least to a level of self-protection in a world that creates all of its “pointy sticks” from them, seems obvious.  And yet it is our nature to leave much needful responsibility and action to others.  In much of the past the process of selection of leaders has been marginally satisfactory; an up and down process to be sure, but perhaps tending more up than down.  Some great thinkers have thought so anyway.  Looking at today’s world, I suspect that selective forces were at work in the past that have dissipated in the present time of peak population, peak energy, peak economic development and peak biodiversity. 

Unless or until people, in general, take on the challenges of learning enough to be effective and powerful forces in their own lives, then the Palins of the world will have, using their own form of elite skills, a ready audience to cheerlead for.  And I would not be happy in a world run by elite cheerleading; it would be too much like high school.

Property, The Religion

In the beginning, the river was for getting water, for washing, for fishing.  The land was for living on, walking on, for hunting on, to contain the workings of life.  The plants were for all the various things that plants and their products were used for; for food, for materials, for shade, for hiding behind, for the simple pleasure in their presence. Animals like-wise: definers of place and habit, food, materials, partners in the living experience. Each thing had its own existence: the stars, sun and moon; the sky, the earth and all the rest. It had always been this way. 

Today we know that it had been this way forever; that is, forever beginning with the earth’s assembly from space dust 4.6 billion years ago and the geologically ‘immediate’ formation of ‘living’ chemistry as the nearly unique liquid water physical stability of the earth’s surface began to manifest out of the freeze of space and the nuclear fire of stars. 

The living manifestation evolved its billions of slightly different forms of expression.  And eventually one of them was capable of perceiving and storing in an evolved biological structure, a brain, vast amounts of detail from its environment and its own experience. 

Then something happened.  The human capacity to adapt, using the mechanisms of the newly evolved Consciousness System of Order, generated a new design to both carry the information of experience across space and time, and including devices to fit and moderate human action in the environments in which the communities lived, superceding the Living System of Order processes.  This new design, that I call Story [1] became formalized, and like the DNA of the living order, stored the community’s information, incorporated changes and supplied new generations with the information for orderly relationship and action. 

For the stories to have power, they needed to contain a source of power and so was created the ‘special story people’ who could be seen as ‘giving’ the information.  Those entities were said to possess special wisdom and other special capacities, omnipotence and omniscience, powers of creation; all in the service of Story, to make Story more influential and more protected from the vicissitudes of daily randomness.  

One of the consequences (among many) was the magnification and modification of the idea of obligation into a new form of the idea of ownership.  In the form of syllogism: the storied creators of our world have special control of what they have created.  They created not only the world, but us as well, and have therefore control of us.  We have an obligation to the creators for our existence.  The world, and all that is in it, is therefore the product and property of the creators and we owe them obedience as an obligation for living in this world. 

In this construction people’s actions in the world around them are not greatly changed, they still use the needed space and resources, but a new idea is forming: that more than the simple production of one “man’s hand” can be his or hers and exclusive to him or her.  The world and all that is in it is the product of the creating entity’s hand and all of it is exclusive to that entity.  Once such a idea forms it is no great distance to selected humans acting as the agents for the creating entity and claiming “power of attorney” for the Storied Creator.  It is from such humble beginnings that we have molded the complexities of religions… and of our ideas of property. 

Religion has been an important part of both the idea of property and ownership and the processes of change of that idea.  The next essay will look more closely at the functional form that the idea of property has taken in recent times; in this one I am primarily concerned with setting the stage from which Enlightenment notions of property arose. 

Recorded history is to a large extent a working out of the details of how the supernatural “owners” of the world pass aspects of that control to humans – it is the story of the intermediaries: Pharaohs, temple priests, God-kings, oracles, all manner of royalty and their relationship to the sovereignty of the personal body and space.  More cynically, it is the story of how segments of societies and individuals have used (and some would add here, misused) the beliefs that both motivate and adhere to the adaptive behaviors of a changing humanity. 

Two traditions have, since the origin of religion as a supernaturally driven rather than an environmentally driven institution, been in conflict: (1) everything is owned absolutely by a creator that can parcel out rights and privileges or (2) nothing is owned in an absolute sense, all uses are mutual obligations for the maintenance of the system integrity.  

For a hundred thousand years these two ways of relating to the world were one and the same in a simple balance of both action and idea: the world is one creation, we are of it and must give as good as we get.  But as some human communities grew in size, material wealth and complexity, property relations became more difficult.  Religious views and God’s spokespeople were a ready solution.  And we have largely been under the influence of the institutional religious model ever since: God is the absolute owner of the universe and has given the surface of the earth to humans to do with as they will.  Therefore humans have absolute dominion.  And, by the way, God takes care of all the gears and motors so we need only deal with what we want to deal with – those things that make some of us more powerful in relation to others for example 

Property, and our conceptions of it, is both a driver and consequence – chicken and egg – in this process.  John Locke (1632 – 1704) was one of God’s (unofficial) spokespeople, with a difference.  Locke was embedded in the Royal tradition of ownership and so spoke of privatizing property, not from the public commons, but from the universal dominion of the King.  The commons for a European in the mid seventeenth century were royal lands held by religious authority.  This was tradition for almost all of recorded history. 

King John and the Barons worked out, in 1215, a deal that they too should have some authority of dominion and in an enlightened gesture included English citizens in the bargain.  Though, in large measure, property continued to be thought of in the same way.  Blackstone’s statement of the meaning of property in 1760s clearly shows that [2]. 

Ultimately, in the religious model, there is no authority for the holding and use of property other than force.  I will argue later on in this series for another model, but for now it is the notion of absolute dominion broken into smaller tradable pieces that is the basis for how we view and act with property. 

Locke sought after the ways that property might be assigned its portion of God-given dominion with such devices as priority, use and need.  And the business of law has followed the pattern ever since.  Capitalism is based on this notion of absolute dominion. 

In a typical adaptive twist, today Locke’s argument for private property and its needful separation from the (Kingly) commons has been turned into a rejection of the public commons.  This is, no more or less, than the attempt to restore the Kingly commons under the title of private property.  This is a natural consequence of maintaining the notion of absolute dominion. 

The other model, that nothing can be absolutely owned, that there is only forms of relationship with mutual obligations, has had a continuing presence in minor philosophies, small human communities and as a Zombie in capitalist horror movies.  But for now it is still the old absolutist model fueling our rush toward the ecological crossroads. 

[1] Dawkins and Blackmore call them ‘meme’, but I am wary of the attempt to follow the analogy of gene so closely and fearful of the directions that such thought might be led.  So I, for my own thinking, have chosen an ambiguous term that I must reconsider every time I think or write it. 

[2] “Property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”  John Locke’s view interpreted by William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765 – 1769)

Property, The Biology

The ideas of property and ownership seem so completely obvious that at first blush there seems to be nothing much to consider: ‘This is mine, that is yours and that is pretty much the end of it.  Sure, there might be a dispute about a particular thing, but it is still a dispute about who the thing belongs to, not the nature of ownership itself.’ 

Much of, especially, the western world has come to believe that all manner of things can be and should be owned by individuals; many people, often those who own very little, become genuinely frightened by the idea that private ownership may not be absolute.  And there are those who are benefited by periodically tickling that fear. 

The idea of property and ownership is a fundamental way of relating to the world around us forming the most basic designs of our worldview.  From a purely intellectual position it can be realized that such views have histories, are only the present state of our ideas and will be replaced in the future with other ideas.  Such a recognition can be uncomfortable, but is necessary. 

First, what are the origins of our present notions? What is the idea of property and ownership anyway? Human behavior is an incredibly complex amalgam of the Primate Pattern of instincts and behavioral propensities and the products of the Consciousness Order processes – often in conflict [1]. This is where we must begin. 

Every organism must protect the space in which it lives and which provides its essential needs.  The many designs of such protections are fascinating in their own right from secretions put into the soil by plants that inhibit the growth of other plants to the evolution of the male lion as the very essence of territorial and community domination.  These designs also establish the basic functional conception of property: the organism has the use of the space and resources that it can protect, either passively like a tall tree collecting sunlight before it can get to the shorter plants or actively like chimps guarding their frontier from the intrusions of a neighboring clan. 

Humans bring with them the Primate Pattern of behaviors and the instinctual designs, now acting as behavioral propensities, evolved over the millions of years of our history.  We are no tabula rasa.  While many of us have come to prefer thinking that humans are independent of the rest of life, we are really another phenotypic expression of 30,000 or so genes evolved for certain ecosystem relations.  The failure to consider these basics will result in wrong conclusions every time; like trying to tune a piano while ignoring (or denying) the harmonic relationships of the strings. 

What humans bring to the equation is an outsized capacity to protect space and resources.  In addition, humans have adapted their communities to many environments changing not only the relationships between individuals, but the size of communities, the ways of acquiring essential needs and the adaptive designs of their belief systems that record and pass successful behaviors on from generation to generation. 

A result has been that the idea of property has been through many iterations, many different adaptive forms, that function to relate community behavior to the ecosystems in which we have lived.  Of course, each community culture has held its view to be natural and correct, and even sometimes seeing other conceptions of which they become aware as incomprehensible, silly, subversive, even evil. 

When communities were the primary source of order and power, property was primarily communal.  As technology gave individuals greater capacities, and property could be protected by individuals, more aspects of property could be privately held.  But this simplifies too much. 

I have read a number of economists touting the private property behavior of “primitive peoples” as though this proved the correctness of their post-Lockean conception of property while not understanding another dimension of property as relationship.  Just to mention it here with further consideration later: private property can be thought of as a relationship and as such we should realize that relationships can be of varying qualities; some are abusive, some are fructifying, some are distant, some are expansive and inclusive, some are narrow and rejecting.  That a piece of property (real or personal) can be identified with an individual tells almost nothing about the social habit with which it is held. 

As humans expanded their capacity to protect space and resource sites, both as communities and as individuals, they produced behaviors that organized how these community properties were to be used.  In today’s conceptual structure we call these behaviors religion or primitive religions or pantheistic religions. 

The original role of what we (confusedly) call religion today was to serve as a device mediated by the Consciousness System of Order to adapt community behavior to the environment, to select, store and pass on effective community actions.  Obviously a very important part of these belief systems were the community, family and individual relationships to the land space and resources of the land space. 

Since there were many different environments lived in and many different relationships adaptively designed, the concept of property has, over time, taken many different forms – all “correct” for their occasion.  However, when humans discovered agriculture, and population and power exploded, new forces began to drive concepts of property; faster and always in ways that expanded human capacity, but not always in ways that maintained sustaining human adaptations to the ecosystem.  The consequence has been that humans took on the concept of overcoming what were now seen as restraints of the environment rather than as information about how to sustain and use its natural beneficence. 

In this new world, property took on a decidedly different form eventually becoming in the West: 

“Property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”   John Locke’s view interpreted by William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765 – 1769) 

How this happened and what it means for us today is vital for us to understand to take on challenges to our very survival.  How we think about property is pivotal.

[1] The Consciousness System of Order is an essential concept.  Discussions of this idea are sprinkled throughout these essays.  It is considered more fully in The Madness – Part Four