Property by any other name

Perhaps the problem is that we are so used to making assumptions about property in our daily lives that we hardly think about what the term really means—what property actually is.  It has something to do with the root of the word, proper—what is fitting or suitable—and its sibling propriety, meaning an action or reward appropriate to a particular person.  The latter once referred to an inherent quality—that those with certain inborn characters had particular things owing to them.  In that sense the term seems to include a notion of ownership.  But in our modern world of supposed social equality we conceive of property as concerning material goods or financial advantages (as with intellectual property) belonging to specific persons.  In this discussion, we will ignore any assumption of inherent right, and use the word property to mean the exclusive control of a particular resource.

We are so accustomed to our contemporary notion of personal property that we hardly think about how we ever accumulated this cluster of commitments.  Even to speak the words conjures associations that have become fixed, sacrosanct, nearly untouchable in our mythology.  We have come to regard property as something that exists objectively—a right belonging absolutely and indisputably to a specific individual or group, as if it were recognized as such by the universe at large.  (Don’t touch that!  It’s not yours!)  We have gone so far in this thinking that we can hardly imagine a patch of ground or an exploitable resource anywhere that is not owned by someone, even if we have to endow that ownership by default to some abstract state.

Imagine you step onto a city bus, proceed directly to your favorite seat, only to find it occupied by someone else.  “That seat is mine!” you declare loudly.  The occupant of the seat laughs, as does everyone else in listening range.  The driver of the bus scolds you and tells you to sit down.  We have all made similar declarations from time to time: Move, you’re in my way!  Let go, that’s my shopping cart.  Move, this is my traffic lane.  That’s my exit coming up.  This is my favorite view.  (Not yours.)  This is my front yard—get your dog away.  Leave now, this is my room.  Where’s my dinner?  My potato, dibs.  We speak as if resources that exist in our common world (and could be used just as well by someone else) exist for our use alone.  But any of those things might have belonged to another, and in the next hour or decade may actually do so.  One potato is pretty much interchangeable with another—a different one would probably have done the job.  Our control of any one is at best temporary.  A tiger might eye your shin, thinking, You suppose it’s yours?  In a few moments it will be my dinner!  We don’t like that idea.  But we still like the idea of owning our own property.  Those who feel most strongly about personal property are usually the kind of people who don’t care much for city buses.  (That’s my parking spot, dammit!  See the name on it?  That’s my name!  Now move your piece of crap.)

But let’s see what happens when we give the old concept a slightly different name.  Let’s refrain, for a few minutes, from using the term property.  Instead, let’s say that we have a temporary control of a resource—a clunky designation to be sure, but strange enough to do the trick.  This piece of land, thinks the present surveyor, is an accessible resource that I can exploit for my immediate good.  But the squatter, being human, soon becomes accustomed to the occupancy and thinks: I, the present holder, have discretion over both its present AND its future exploitation!  The rest of you are hereby given notice.  Stay out!  It is for my exclusive pleasure.  Forever.  Or we might think, This tool in my hand is a resource that might fit many hands and do many jobs but I claim the exclusive right to wield it, for my purpose and no one else’s.  Or we might even say, This consumable product of a natural process (a stream fed by rainwater, the wood taken from a tree) was here long before I showed up but now exists only for my consumption, not yours.  How did such thinking emerge in our species?  How can any one of us claim that we were destined to the possession of a specific piece of land, a particular tool, a consumable product of nature?  We were aware of no such resource when we came into the world.  None of us were born with the inherent right to a specific resource ahead of any other person (or animal), nor even with a notion of an abstract right to enjoy such a monopoly.  If no one had informed me of my exclusive right to a particular resource, I might have taken whatever resource happened to fall within range of sight at the moment of my need.  The notion of an exclusive right to the use of a particular resource even when I was not near the resource nor had immediate need of it must have been acquired at some time between the moment of my birth and my present awareness.  So how did I gain control of this resource at the exclusion of other potential users?  What makes me think control of this resource must be mine alone?

The answer lies partly in our inherited nature, the rest in recorded history.  The present iteration of homo sapiens (that is, us) exists only because countless preceding generations—like the ancestors of all presently-observable species—were successful in raising offspring to adulthood in highly-competitive environments.  Any successful species (that is, any that perpetuates itself over time) must find sufficient resources to maintain the lives of its individual members, while competing with other individuals and other species for limited resources, then raise a sufficient number of offspring to do the same in the next generation.  None of these challenges are easily met.  Not all individuals or species are successful, either in the short term or the long.  In fact, most species that have ever existed died out eventually, displaced by others—often distant kin.  But in the shorter term (that is, within the space of a few hundred generations), individual species can prosper quite well in their specific and familiar environments.  These are rewarded with more offspring, which may sometimes make their survival strategies less viable in the longer term.  Those who manage to raise offspring in the more demanding environments will be the most competitive members of their species.  Think of a massive elephant seal enjoying his private beach and personal harem after driving away or killing numerous male rivals.  He is the one who will breed the next generation, as he monopolizes the fertile females on the beach.  But this also means he has a lot to lose in future struggles.  He will be taken down only by old age or violent overthrow.  That is a contest entirely between individuals within the same species.  Such intense competition over thousands of generations will amplify the role of testosterone and aggression within the species—the most relentlessly violent will gain the exclusive right to breed and pass on their aggressive tendencies to their sons.  And the same is true of countless other animal species—insects, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals.  Primates too.  That’s us.  We are necessarily the inheritors of highly aggressive genes.  We are able to consider these tendencies of ours only because we are descended from the most successfully violent and unyielding ancestors.  All the reasoning capacity we possess will make little difference to these underlying competitive instincts.  But reasoning capacity is undoubtedly a considerable part of the reason our species has survived in so many environments despite want of fur, teeth, claws and quick reflexes.  We have given up these things because we have found that cooperation and foresight work better.  Reason has become the indispensable tool in our competitive struggle for resources and progeny.

Our personal experiences and practices will help refine what our genetic inheritance has taught our ancestors to do.  We get used to occupying, controlling and enjoying specific resources (my house, my room, my toy, my bike) long before we are able to apply critical thought to these habits.  We bring our accumulated shortcuts into the present moment, then project them into the unforeseen future, and (through Theory of Mind) onto our rivals and competitors.  We understand, unconsciously or consciously, that they are doing the same.  But, unlike other species, we are able to imagine resources that fall outside of our familiar territory, beyond the scope of our immediate senses, beyond what we can guard in the moment, beyond what we need in the foreseeable present.  Other animal species hoard resources—squirrels, foxes, birds—but not beyond their personal needs, and not much beyond their familiar future.

Our historical notions of property have developed in tandem with profound changes in the way homo sapiens has earned its living in the last ten thousand years (less than 5% of the duration of our species).  The spread of settled, agricultural communities in the Near East after the end of the last ice age provided our species with unprecedented opportunities for accumulating and storing critical resources beyond immediate needs—which may be termed wealth—hardly possible in the mobile hunting-and-gathering lifestyles that had defined our species until then.  These new sedentary communities were larger than the wandering tribes of their ancestors, though still intimate and fairly egalitarian.  But as such villages grew larger and competed more aggressively with neighboring communities, control of local resources and of the community itself became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few local elites.  In semi-arid regions, where settled agriculture was not viable, nomadic communities accumulated substantial herds of grazing animals, which conferred wealth and status on a few leading members—who naturally followed their genetic compulsion to pass their advantages on to their offspring.  They allied with other powerful accumulators, sealed these alliances and their domination of resources through marriages.  Wealth became heritable and ever more concentrated.  Those with wealth tended to hold corresponding social influence, encouraging laws and beliefs that would protect and justify their monopolies.  These monopolies became hardened into hereditary lines.  Competitive males of our species (as in others) wanted to be sure that the children they passed their wealth and advantages to were really their own, so placed increasing restrictions on the personal freedoms of wives, concubines, daughters.  It’s hard to blame them—any of our slightly-less-charismatic ancestors (at least among those who produced descendants) would have done the same had they been among the fortunate few.

But our own familiar notions of property are much less ancient, going back only a few centuries to the time of the Enlightenment and the crucible of the French Revolution—the beginning of our modern, global society.  The Enlightenment employed critical reasoning, good-natured satire and innovative analyses of human behavior to undermine a great many traditional habits of thought—such as nobility of blood, divine right of rule, natural slavery, and the miraculous foundations of religious authority—but also invented a few very new ideas, such as personal autonomy and fundamental rights, among these the right of property.  The Enlightenment corroded long-established prejudices but did not fundamentally challenge the social hierarchies of its time.  It was the French Revolution that swept aside the entrenched legal institutions and hierarchies, making impossible the return of many of the blatant social and political inequalities of the ancien régime.  But inequalities remained—of gender, race, place, and wealth.  The last of these was now reinforced by newly-cast, legally-defended notions of individual right.  The fledgling American republic, which loudly rejected Old World hierarchical conventions and social distinctions, held firmly to these newly-built conventions—property above all.  It rejected formal, legally-established inequalities so better to preserve the informal ones—wealth, influence, access, power.  American apologists of inequality have taken up new ruling myths of the unbound individual, the irrepressibility of talent, the heroic self-created entrepreneur—all in defense of hitherto-unimagined scales of inequality.  The notion of property is central to it.

For several centuries now, the Western world has cultivated this idea of private property—yet fundamentally unlimited in scale—as the normative standard of the universe.  The Enlightenment had cast property as one of the central natural rights of the individual person.  John Locke (a founding hero of American neoliberal apologists) supported the notion of individual property—along with a highly-constrained role for government—with a rather innovative and naturalistic argument: that property (assumed now to be private property) comes into being when a man (invariably) mixes his personal labor with a resource of nature.  Locke was certainly representative of his historical moment in suggesting that property is a purely temporal manifestation (rather than a divine endowment) and that individuals have the exclusive right and use of the fruits of their personal labor.  An attractive argument, to be sure, but perhaps somewhat narrower in its scope than its champions have claimed.