Ping Pong 12: The Problem of Owning
The previous Rants have raised as a very deep problem the issue of where humans can legitimately assert their own being into the world. This assertion is of course, one of the core problems of justice; For it is the role justice to codify this insertion, and to ensure that my assertion of what I am is measured and allows for the assertion of others of their own being. This problem, in post- English Civil War Britain revolved around the definition of different axes in which this assertion was allowed. - Did it require a code which was distinct from any one person law (eg. a monarchy) or a community or was it the inalienable property of a single individual? This picture has then been further complicated by the position of the miracle. The issue of miracles then appears to complicate this picture, as it apparently robs humans of the right to assert what they are, in any meaningful or clear manner. That is, it makes them always and at every point have to allow for something else, some other agency in the world, in which or through which, the miracle is given. The problem of the insertion of a self will have to include not only the appropriate level of one’s own being, but also allow for the fact that there are elements beyond anything that one is, and yet which are capable of transforming one’s own nature. That is the problem is now, how does one assert what one is, even while allowing that a mystery lies at the heart of one’s own creation. The problem then becomes what is indefatigably one’s own, in spite of everything else? The answer, which is given by Locke at the start of the Eighteenth Century was simple enough: One owns one’s own perceptions, and one’s own labour, and one owns, these come what may. Both these moves very effectively transform one’s understanding of the external world, and therefore of what justice in that world looks like, in their own distinct (and problematic) ways. Each will therefore be considered in turn in this Rant.
On the face of it there is something very modest in Locke’s claim that humans are a blank canvas on which experience is written. The argument seems to pose humans very firmly and rather modestly within a world that is too great or too big for them to comprehend fully; and yet which they can in part clarify, and in learning about, become what they are. To Be a human is therefore to have a series of experiences of the world, and to weave around those experiences a network of deductions and ideas. And yet every idea was to a degree, subject to the further vagaries of experience. One’s nature was therefore never something fixed, but rather the sum of the fluxes which one has torn from the world, and therefore in very considerable flux itself. Locke describes this relationship in terms of the image of a closet. The Mind is like a private closet, he claims, whose only access to the world is through certain windows (the senses) through which light and images are let in. Once those images are within the private closest, they belong to an individual alone, and are his/hers to conjure up a nature with, even though their provenance lies elsewhere.
All of which might, on the face of it, seem a fine liberal doctrine. The very modern arguments of Feminism or human dignity have, up until recently at least, been constellated around a version of this argument. Women and races were made not born. That is, they were the sum of a certain set of experiences. To set a gender or a people free, it was necessary then simply to allow that group a different set of experiences. Social reform becomes on the face of it beautifully straightforward and simple. And yet this simplicity itself is haunted by two corollaries of this argument.
On the one hand, in order for empiricism to throw its net of freedom over a group of people, it must assume that they form a collective series of experiences. It will therefore always and at every level attempt to homogenize experiences that actually might be rather different, and that will certainly be capable of being taken in a whole variety of rather different ways. Perhaps ironically therefore the tendency of empiricism is in fact not to listen to individual experience at all. It will rather quest after types of experiences which might be readily codified, and set up as that set of experiences which, if they were modified in some way would change everything absolutely. Give a gender a vote or the right to work, and the entire problem, the claim then runs, of gender difference will disappear in a trice. The world becomes populated with CAUSES, and with simple souls intent on fulfilling their ‘cause’, and so changing the world. The upshot is that empiricism moves far beyond its modest claims as each human becomes an expert on the behaviour of others, or at least thinks they are if they can codify a series of shared experiences. This claim is so bewitchingly simple that it remains a cornerstone of the modern mind (and of political policy) even when the results it gives are never (quite) what one desired.
On the other hand empiricism is haunted by the truth. The empiricist might only know of the world through their perceptions, and yet there remains a truth really out there, if only one was clever enough to spot it. Moreover, the truth is relatively straightforward. That is, it necessarily reflects the perception of the world that one has. In perceiving and forming one’s own existence within that perception, one is therefore really learning of the world. This last fact leads to a glorious if rather problematic bumptiousness which haunts the empiric. They know they can have access to the truth, and will therefore be rather unwilling to listen to another’s point of view. At which point of course, an entire metaphysic of fancy or reality takes over. In listening to another’s point of view one has to decide whether that other is reflecting the truth (seen from a different perspective) or merely an ideal fancy of the mind. The problem with such a debate is less a problem of simple egotism (a mind can admit that its ideas are indeed fancies) but more of what it ignores. My ability to judge whether another’s ideas (or my own) are fancies, will be rooted, almost invariably rooted in both the assumptions I share with that individual but also my belief in their abilities to perceive. Those who appear odd or strange or simply too different, will therefore be thought to be fantastical, while those who are rather like me will be given special credence. This move itself might not matter, save for the fact that the empiric really is claiming that truth is convened at such moments of juncture. The truth therefore become the property of a certain sub-sect of society. Once again, in a very real sense there is nothing wrong with that. Truth, through the long history of human thought, is usually thought to be so. What is different however is that this access to truth is made in the name of all humanity. These individuals will therefore want to preach their gospel, be it religious or economic, to all the rest of the world, and even assume that they have some simple right (inalienable right) to impose their world view on all the rest. - And that moreover, this imposition is really liberation, as it is the imposition of the truth, and so the forcing of another to be free!
The Modern mantra of economics which seeks to bind a world within the machinations of the free market, and simply assumes that everyone will be better off that way (in the long run), is therefore very much the child of empiricism. It moreover shares one last aspect of that legacy. Uniting both these two last points is what might be called selective blindness. We might be made by our experiences, but it is clear that only certain of those experiences are really kosher, the rest are somehow suspect. Moreover another’s experience will, as it pertains to someone else in a far off land, might really not be relevant to one’s own life (and might not be true anyway). Empiricism therefore fixes a hierarchy to truth, where things near at hand necessarily matter more than elements far off and never heard or seen. This blindspot can then very easily be augmented into a callousness, where that other reality beyond one’s experiential horizon line really does not exist (or at least matter) at all. Or else (and just as problematically) it only matters in ways that can be readily understood in this world. The poor in Nineteenth Century Africa and India might starve as a direct result of economic policies imposed upon them by Britain, and yet in Britain that misery could only be understood through the crystal of religion. Britain sent bibles and missionaries rather than seriously tackling the problem it had in part caused! While in modern days we of course send in the economists and the arms sellers…
The second great innovation of empiricism was what was called the labour theory of ownership. One had a right to own something if one’s own action had made it productive. All of which on the face of it, might seem innocent enough. One had the right to an apple because one picked it, or the rights to a land because one farmed it, or the right to the profits of an invention because one had made it. All of which seems simple enough, although it did lead Locke into bizarre arguments. The logic of his argument, that ownership and use went together, appears to be that aristocrats, who could never use their whole estate had no real right to it, and Locke, who certainly did not want to upset the social order that much, indulges himself in a very long argument to attempt to counter this suggestion. All of which is relatively innocent fun and games (and the delight of the philosophy lecture hall). However there are two very clear and problematic corollaries to Locke’s argument.
Firstly it is clear that this argument was the one used to justify the annexing of North America. The argument ran, that by turning wilderness into productive farms, the European settlers really has gained rights over the land. Ownership therefore went with making a thing useful, and one could ignore all the existing rights or beauties of that land in the cause of this use. This argument is of course one that haunts modern states and modern planning laws. A developer, be they a miner or merely a land owner, will invariably make an appeal to the use of the content of the land in order to justify a claim to it. The People of Biafra might have lived in their jungles for centuries, but when oil was discovered that history mattered relatively little in comparison with the use of the product that their land contained. In effect (and time and time again) use is pitched against history, in a highly asymmetric struggle, which pitches small communities against the needs of a far wider (and possibly at times global) community. Local rights become destroyable within a collective acid of greed.
Secondly there is the example of a slave. While not actually justifying slave ownership, Locke is happy with the idea that if by ‘owning’ another, I transform that other into a useful member of society, then it was in a sense right to own them. Existing rights and customs could thereby be dismissed as laziness, and the right of the Western European to make others useful (to other Western Europeans at least) enshrined. There is indeed a very big issue at stake here, one that goes beyond even the obnoxious argument for slavery. The effect of this argument is to link the rights of owning to a point before the actual thing owned becomes useful. A slave is therefore owned in the promise of being made useful, or petrol is owned by the Oil companies (and makes them money) because they have made it useful.
The effect of the above argument is therefore to move exactly where one defines owning. - One can own, because one has the right to a product which was useless, and yet could be made subsequently useful. One owns because one performs an act of alchemy. This might appear abstruse, but take the example of the internal combustion engine. One reason that this engine has triumphed (and proved so hard to replace) is that it is peculiarly suited to this role. Petrol and also diesel, were initially the useless by-product of the oil industry. Big companies then made them useful (that is, paid for engines to be designed around their abundance). These engines have then changed our world, and directly reward those who made the product so vital. This reward is then further invested, on new dimensions to the fuels already found. However those other engines, for example electric engines (which predate internal combustion engines) have never been blessed with an ‘owner’. That is, such engines use a resource (electricity) which is immediately useful (or not), and never simply ‘owned’: One cannot ‘own’ electricity as one owns (and trades) in oil. One might own its generation, but then that is a different matter (as it ties one down to the owning of gas or oil or coal…). They therefore lacked a protector or large company, who had a privileged access to a resource and the mission to make that resource useful. The irony is of course, that the devices which are often kindest to our wider environment are almost by definition, the ones least easy to own (that is hardest to define a paradigm for owning, or establish a monopoly in) and therefore the least well developed! A situation that is likely to continue until one can find such a paradigm (or change our system for owning).
Empiricism with its ethic of truth within selective relativism, and value within particular use, is very much the creed that gave us our own world. It was how we got here in the first place. And it is therefore what we have to either modify or abandon in order to go anywhere else. Our problem is that its code of justice is now so deep, that this move is perilous. And yet the full nature of that peril remains undefined, and so will form the topic of next week’s Rant.
