The notion of property

The members of our talkative species have acquired some remarkable notions about personal immortality.  Most of us seem vaguely resigned to the likelihood of our death.  Eventually.  Someday.  And yet we go out of our way to put off the seeming inevitability.  We fantasize about a cure for cancer.  We make extravagant claims for wonder drugs and genetic therapies.  We place faith in technologies that might conceivably enhance our natural lifespans, artificially accomplishing what miserly nature seems unwilling to do.  In the meantime, we take solemn measures to extend our power and authority beyond the grave, erecting monuments to ourselves in order to ensure our immortality.  We draw up wills, set up charitable foundations, make bequests, plan mausoleums, endow buildings, parks and highways.  We want our names to be remembered even when our unreliable bodies have perished.

Human beings have been doing such things as long as they have been leaving traces of themselves behind.  We all know the pyramids at Giza, called into being nearly five thousand years ago by Egyptian pharaohs presenting themselves as living gods.  Their people seem to have believed them, judging by the results—massive stone monuments that still stand at the edge of the desert.  And we can visit the thousand-year-old step-pyramids of the Mayans in the Yucatan peninsula—seeming out of place against the encroaching jungle—find traces of sacrificial victims thrown into pits, imagine the massive, coordinated economies required to build such monuments.  These people must have believed that they dominated the earth, that their power would endure forever.  The ancient Etruscans left behind magnificent rooms sealed for the pleasure of their deceased occupants, filled up with valuable grave goods, ensuring that those resources would be of no use to their descendants.  They probably thought they would need such goods in the afterlife, else their tombs would indicate callous disregard of the wants of the living.  We can contemplate the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the vestiges of the Great Wall in northern China, or the buried terracotta army of the emperor Qin Shi Huang.  We might ponder the meaning of the great stone circles of Britain’s ancient Celtic past.  We enter with silent wonder the massive cold interiors of Gothic cathedrals, which stood at the center of the late-medieval economy, though no individual person in that society claimed ownership of these monuments.  They belonged to God.  All of these are the physical remains of individuals and communities who arrogantly believed they owned and controlled their physical environments, fancied their power and glory extending into the infinite future.  Now we dig their decayed remains out of street works and basements, place a few curious fragments into museums.  Yet we no longer respect their illusions of control over eternity.  We wander the ambulatories of the great cathedrals with no inclination to piety.  It seems likely that future generations of humanity will show the same scant respect for our own illusions of ownership and control.  Our dearly-held notions of property—those things we think rightfully, unequivocally and eternally belong to us—are only passing fantasies.

And yet we still insist on asserting ownership over things even when those things must matter less to us than to any other person on earth—after we are dead.  We employ wills, civil codes, entails, legal firms and social conventions to perpetuate our personal preferences when we can have no possible concern for the affairs of the temporal world.  Surely any quantity of disinterested thought would make us see the uselessness and arrogance of such behavior.  Yet it seldom does.  Inheritance—the notion that the offspring of our flesh should carry our ownership into the eternal future—is a popular symptom of this shared madness, a transparent attempt to solidify the illusion of mastery over death.  Strangely, it is an illusion that works very well, as heirs tend to agree that our intentions (precisely what a will is) should outlive our mortal existence.  We fancy that we can command others forever, even from the grave.  Inheritance is a desperate bid at immortality, by means of genetic favoritism.  It succeeds, for a while.  Survivors retain a nagging anxiety about dishonoring the ancestors if they should fail to carry out their wishes after they are gone.  (It’s what he would want us to do!)  If they do not honor the dead, the lawyers will.  But in truth the dead can have no rights.  Certainly no interests.  The dead have the least need of resources of anyone imaginable.  Yet that’s where they survive—in the imaginations of the living.  Their claim over resources can only be what we allow them.  If we were really concerned with the best interests of humanity—that is, with currently-breathing humans and those yet to come—we would decide that these fancies ought to have no reign over the living, unless to their benefit.  And since it is only the living who have need of resources, the distribution of the former property of the deceased would be undertaken entirely for the needs of the living.  And, since all of the presently-living have a stake in the distribution of resources, we would find no special reason to think that the benefits should go to a genetically-favored few at the expense of the rest.

Consider the question from the other end of life.  A human infant is born helpless—possessing nothing, needing everything, owning and controlling no resources.  For the child to survive more than a few hours, it depends on the mercies of hitherto strangers.  This is true of every human baby, without exception.  Yet these creatures are artlessly arrogant—thinking the universe exists only to serve their whims.  A baby cares not what resources are used, as long as they meet its demands.  It has no preferences, no notion that these resources here rightfully belong to it rather than to others, or that they might just as usefully be given to some other helpless newborn.  It wants, endlessly, but not any specific things over others.  It does not say to itself, Ah, I see that this house has belonged to my ancestors for generations and is properly for my use.  All other shelters would be unacceptable.  For that matter, any nursing woman might provide the necessary care and attention.  All resources are fair game, so far as the baby is concerned.  Everything might as well belong to it, though the notion of property means nothing.  Only those who supply its needs are worried about which resources are properly within the proprietary reach of the child.  Such notions and distinctions are unnatural, entirely learned.  And learned within a specific social context—otherwise the baby would not survive.  If it could survive on its own—like a sea turtle leaving its natal beach—everything within range of its solitary efforts would rightfully belong to it.  Only through social conventions do we come to think that some things belong to some babies and not to others.  We have been taught and encouraged to think so.  Those who tell us these things were likewise told and conditioned to believe these conventions.  The newborn baby will learn—eventually.  But not yet.  At the moment, it assumes it deserves everything it craves, cares not which resources are used to meet its needs.  The baby, like the members of other species, will in time learn to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate uses of resources, but not because such distinctions are obvious by nature’s lights.  They are purely conventional.  Babies develop as social creatures and usually come to embody the prejudices of those nearest to them.  Soon enough they regard those prejudices as indisputable facts of reality.

In Sri Lanka, farmers have long competed with elephants for fields and grain-crops.  Elephants have as much need of food as human beings.  But they have an unmatched capacity to lay a field bare in a few hours.  Traditionally, human farmers have guarded these fields during the growing season, then turned them over to the pachyderms when the harvest is in.  Are there alternatives to this gentle but somewhat grudging coexistence?  One is violence, which would inevitably mean the slaughter of the elephants.  Perhaps reasoning would work?  The farmers might send the elephants away with a firm lecture about property rights and the binding rule of law.  But any such argument—that the field and its bounty are the exclusive and perpetual property of a small tribe of humans—would likely prove unpersuasive to elephants.  The field is merely one resource of many.  The elephants are hungry now.  They have young ones too.  They will be deterred only if their fear outweighs their hunger.  Non-human animals have some notions of territory, certainly of rivalry, yet none of enduring property.  Human animals are not too far removed.  Property exists only in the opinions of human beings who suppose that there can be exclusive claims over certain resources, or in those of other human beings who agree to recognize and respect such claims.  But beyond those opinions, property exists no where at all.

Property has no foundation in nature.  It is entirely artificial—a social construct, a human invention.  The only mind beyond your own that might recognize your claim of property is one belonging to another human being.  But that other mind has interests too and designs on similar resources, often the same ones.  That other might resort to violence to establish their right, but then the right would hardly be a right at all, only a successful application of force.  And so, in a civil society, a right of property-holding is necessarily an agreement or compromise between the various interest-holders and resource-users of that society.  It can never be an absolute or eternal right.  At best, time-bound creatures can lease temporary concessions to available resources.  Thus the right of personal property can be publicly acknowledged only according to its present social utility, which must always take into account the needs of other members of that society—all of them.