The Logic of Ideas: Property
The idea of property was the original motivation for this project. In reading Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan, I was intrigued by what I saw the role property played in motivating genocide. Kiernan doesn’t specifically talk about property; he analyzes the way in which groups claim rights to displace and/or dispossess other groups of land, based on how the land is being used vs. a perception of more ‘productive’ use.
The transition of ‘land’ or ‘territory’ into ‘property’ makes land a means – it goes from being to being-for, being something that has utility for someone. Utility ultimately involves one of two modalities: alteration or exclusion. If the land is to be worked through agriculture, used to support animal husbandry or ranching, become a habitation, put to recreational use or exploited for resources, it is altered from its previous state. If it is unaltered but becomes property, then it belongs to someone, some group or some organization, which has the right to exclude others from it. ‘Others’ being people and creatures that may have utilized it previously.
Land alteration always involves destruction. Plants are removed and soil tilled so crops can be sowed. Trees are cleared to make way for farms and ranches. Earth is dug and removed to mine for ore and precious metals. Waterways are dammed or redirected. Fences, irrigation, roads, buildings, and all other manner of human ‘improvements’ that take place once land becomes property alter – that is, destroy – what was before.
Native species of plants give way to domesticated strains or invasive species from elsewhere. Insects and animals that rely on them for food are displaced and/or die out. Predators who rely on those animals for food are likewise displaced, fenced out or hunted to extinction to protect domesticated animals, who replace the indigenous wild prey. Sustainable ecosystems are disrupted or destroyed so that land may become productive property.
Productivity, in this case, is nothing other than the possibility of the flourishing of human beings from out of a subsistence, hunter-gatherer state into a ‘civilization’. For humans to increase their number beyond what the land could support, they had to turn it into property and make it more productive than it was as land. Productivity for humans meant and continues to mean, alteration and destruction of virtually everything non-human: plants, animals, and the environment.
Civilization requires more productivity from the land than it provides naturally. To have more people, you need more food, more protection, more shelter, etc. Altering the land for this use is both destructive and exclusive – what was there is destroyed and anything non-human that was using it is excluded. Additionally, in order that the humans making the land productive can protect the gains they make, other humans are excluded. The mechanism by which all of this is accomplished is property.
As in the last post about Rights, we ask, ‘What is Property?’ As before, we answer, it is a symbol, an idea, of something absent that puts boundaries on the present. However, Property defines more than moral (im)permissibility in the present. Where natural rights are constraints on human behavior vis-à-vis humans, property is both a legal constraint on human behavior towards other humans and a moral imposition on the property itself, anything living on it, and anything produced by it.
The constraint of property between humans is that once an individual has property, that individual has a legal right to it that cannot be abrogated by others illegally. Property is the idea that frames the human conception of legal ownership (vs simple possession). Legal ownership, in turn, confers not just legal rights, but imposes a moral hierarchy with respect to the property and any living or non-living thing on it (or produced by it). The individual who has legal ownership of property can treat or dispose of it in any manner s/he desires. With respect to property, the owner is morally sovereign.
So, to trace the mechanism of property: property is how land moves from it’s natural, semi-productive state for all living inhabitants to an improved productive state specifically for the benefit of human beings. That move is necessarily destructive to non-humans and in many cases, humans as well. At the very least is it exclusionary of other humans. In recognizing property, humans give other humans legal entitlement to ownership, but also a moral entitlement to treat and dispose of property as the owner sees fit.
The logic of the idea of property is then this: property, as idea, is a symbol that structures human relationships with each other, and human relationships to land, plants and animals. It confers legal priority and moral priority to the owner. This in turn disorders the previous relationship land has to itself and that of the animals and plants on it.
Other than physical obstructions (cliffs, chasms, etc.), land has no boundaries. It is indifferent; plants and animals on it recognize nothing other than the territories of competing species – their own or others. When land becomes property, boundaries are imposed upon the boundary-less land. Again, this imposition of boundaries sets legal and moral limits on other humans. The idea of property is what makes exclusionary communities possible.
By exclusionary communities, I mean nothing less than polities – political organizations of people. Without property, groups may create criteria for inclusion and exclusion from membership. Families, tribes, communes, etc. all have explicit or implicit criteria for membership. This membership may confer benefits or status. The idea of property combined with the idea of membership creates a polity – a group defined not just by appearance, history, traditions, language, etc. but also by possession and habitation on a bounded land area.
Thus property makes possible the notion of a state or nation of individuals who previously were bonded, but not by something which bounds their movement. The boundaries that property imposes are limits to access and free travel. Prior to property, bonded groups may have territory which can be transgressed. After property, bonded groups inhabit land with boundaries, the transgression of which constitutes a violation of law.
Prior to property, bonded groups can impose law internally, on their own members. Disputes with others who are not part of the group are adjudicated in a state of war. Property makes bonded groups into polities, who now can impose laws on those who are not part of the polity. Property is the true foundation of our formal conception of law, which is a requirement for the creation of political bodies like states or nations.
Now we come to a true understanding of the power of the idea of property. It is not simply a symbol of ownership. It is the idea which takes us from a state of association or membership to one of citizenship. Citizenship is more than being part of a bonded group. It is having an association with bounded land: having an association with a circumscribed geographical area that transcends the relationships of kin, tribe, language, tradition, etc. Property is an organizational principal of human beings which moves groups from landless (if territoried) groups to ‘civilizations’.
If property is destructive and exclusionary, and if property is the foundation of civilized societies, then civilized societies are built on destruction and exclusion. The primary organizational principle of human beings is one that requires the alteration of land, which changes, damages and eliminates pre-existing ecosystems and limits access to other human beings. It makes possible legal systems as we understand them and polities. Human organization into political bodies is an act of violence.
To return to Kiernan: human history is a long, continuous narrative of the perpetuation of violence and genocide in the name of property and its effacement and forgetting. There is no record of a group of individuals who, once having developed the idea of property, have not violently altered land in the name of their own flourishing and/or have not committed atrocities against those they see as either impinging upon or violating their rights to property. There is no way to be civilized in good conscience; one must ignore or forget the basis for one’s civility to live without guilt or regret. This is bad conscience, enabled by reason, which both creates the justification – the idea of property – and erases any emotional connection to it.