Freedom, rights, and property ... how easy it is to get them all mixed up.
Yes, you guessed correctly: I'm not exactly in agreement with the good Mr. Locke, and I'll tell you why.
First, let's get clear on what Locke was up to, and I will admit that I have singled him out because he had such a strong influence on America's so-called Founding Fathers, and their legacy is haunting not only Americans, but the rest of the world today. Locke decided that if you made something in nature productive (or useful) you then had a right to call it yours. For example, say I find a long, sturdy stick in the woods. I take it home, work on it, shape, sand and shellack it, and I then have an impressive staff that could be used as a walking aid on long treks or as a weapon of defense. According to Locke, it is mine and I can use it or sell it as I wish. Intuitively this seems very reasonable (which it should, as it's coming out of the Age of Reason). By a similar token, there's a patch of land, only lightly wooded, so I clear it, plow it, plant it and then harvest the crops I have sown. Is the field mine? Am I entitled to the products (in this case, the crops) it yields? This is more difficult scenario than the one with the stick, isn't it? Whose patch of land was it to begin with. That depends. If it were today, it could certainly belong to someone else, and you would be required to determine who that is then come to an agreement with that person about using it. Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that we're on the North American continent, say, somewhere around Pittsburgh, 250 years ago. What about now?
There are those who would argue that, yes, first come, first served and the one who makes the most productive use of that land is entitled to it. Well, what about the Native Americans who used that land as part of their hunting grounds and where they gathered other things to use and eat? According to Locke, since the use of the land for agriculture produces a greater value, it's the farmer's. He arrives at this conclusion by simple economic reasoning: the wheat produced can be used to bake more bread to feed more people than the "mere" use of that land for hunting and gathering. And it is here that any thinking individual will see there's something of a problem. He uses a utilitarian argument (the greatest good for the greatest number of people) but that is rather culturally determined. The loss of that land, of course depending on the size, reduces the quality of life for the hunter-gather culture. Utilitarianism is used to culturally define what is "more" or "better". It's not a convincing argument. The pragmatists among you will say, well it didn't belong to anyone, so what's the problem?
My question is why is something not obviously owned by a specific individual not owned by anyone? Why don't we consider it owned by everyone? That is more or less how the Native Americans were viewing it: whoever was passing through could use it for their purposes. The notion of "ownership" doesn't make a lot of sense, yet it is the notion of "ownership" that drives almost all of our thinking about everything these days. Property rights are a very big deal. They were (and are) at the heart of the financial and economic crisis from which we have not yet recovered. Property rights are something we need to think about seriously and deeply.
Mr. Locke was, among other things, an administrator of one of the American colonies. It is not hard to surmise that he may have had a person, vested interest in viewing property as he did. It was certainly to his advantage, and he used his arguments to morally justify what was happening with the Native Americans. We have every right ... in fact, I believe we have the obligation, to re-look at this position today, not because we're smarter now than we were then, but because it was questionable then, and it is still questionable now.
The next time I'll go into why this is so.
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