Spearthrower wrote:THWOTH wrote:I'll grant that. But I still feel you arrived with the concept of property and then cited the lizard's jurisdiction over its territory as a persistent justification for the concept being essentially natural,..
No, as I just told you - there was nothing about justification in there at all. Not only did I not write anything like that, I also specifically told you that's not what I meant.
My interest is solely about how such factors arise. This is what has always interested me about everything. It's why I studied ancient history, then anthropology, and what really led me to stop believing in Christianity.
We humans have this way of generating special-me stories setting us apart from nature, as if property and land ownership are purely human inventions when both are widely evident among other species.
All we've done is add our cognitive-linguistic layer to them, codifying them according to events in our ancestors' past. There's nothing special about any of those laws - they could all be changed should people desire it.
However, our social nature is also hierarchical, and we've created an economic layer which means wealth translates to power, which in turn means those who have power are also the least likely to want to see any change given that the current system has obviously worked out well for them. The powerless might benefit from change, but they don't have the power to change it. A neat little system that trickles change rather than frequently offering up radical shifts.
THWOTH wrote:... and to some extent ubiquitous within nature. Unlike the lizard we are a social species who flourish as individuals only within the context of the community, and I feel your example plays into individualistic notions which negate community and instead place humans within a context more akin to Hobbes' war of all against all.
I picked a lizard entirely at random and could've picked any of a thousand other animals. I actually wrote up to about that point then accidentally jogged my mouse and closed the window losing my first post. I can't remember what animal I wrote in that first post except that it wasn't a lizard.
THWOTH wrote:Furthermore, I see no relevant distinction between land and other basic necessities such as food, water, shelter, etc, as each is dependent on the other.
I wasn't really talking specifically about basic necessities. I was talking about a division between property - which is portable - and ownership of land which stays where it is.
However, land in the territorial sense is obviously not just indicating a section of earth, but rather the resources that section contains - so hunting or foraging grounds, a water source, desirable shelter or nesting grounds etc. Land ownership means owning a means to survive, which is presumably why it was favoured by natural selection.
I have to state very clearly here so you don't misunderstand: I am not suggesting that humanity should run its societies in accordance with natural selection: that would be ghastly - as bad as we are, we're far better than that. Knowing how something arose doesn't suggest that it should remain unchanged eternally. Rather, it might help us understand something about us and our extremely deep passions when it comes to such subjects - there's hundreds of billions of years going on under the hood, underneath any words we may use to frame it.
No need to fisk me Sandra! I'm not one of your tuppeny chew toys!
Invoking land in relation to a view of property as something that "predates humanity by hundreds of millions of years through territoriality" does rather appear to naturalise human property relations. Because that's what we're talking about here I think; what we as social creatures, within contemporary societies that broadly adhere to global economic frameworks, think about property, ownership, and land, and how we relate to these ideas. I accept that this is not what you intended, and I'm not trying to debunk you. I'm just trying to reflect where you've led me - yet giving an account of ownership in terms of "the lizard's ownership is obligated to engage in a trial of force" does, in my view, suggest that (current) human property relations are typified by 'natural' or necessary violence and conflict over resources. If this wasn't the kind of thing you intended to bring to the discussion why mention it? (and yes, I have read your entire response before I started typing). Perhaps we both think it's relevant, but we disagree in what way it's relevant.
Understanding where these things came from is helpful - I just think the example of the lizard fails because it pitches individuals against individuals within a context that necessitates conflict, whereas our 'origins story'
is one of cooperative development, and peoples have (and can, and do) conceptualise of the things we call property in different forms: in terms of something like 'the commons' or by adopting a cross-generational custodial relationship with resources and things like land.
Perhaps at this juncture you'll point out that we cooperate at the community level in order to engage in resource conflicts with other communities, and while that is certainly true I don't think we can pin that entirely on a basal conception of ownership of property or an evolutionary desire/need to control resources, even in conflicts at levels mediated through social institutions like the law or governments.
On the other hand, I agree that things like law and governments are socially constructed entities over which we have (or at least in theory should have) control. You outlined the short-comings of our mediating social-legal and social-economic structures very well, and yet you also seemed to imply that there's a certain social utility in the way our economic and power relations are structured and play out, because they preference incremental rather than sudden change; they promote continuity and order over discontinuity and disorder; they act as forces from which social goods can trickle down slowly rather than offering radical, destabilising shifts. Call me a Lefty Thelma if you like, but the current conception of property and ownership appears to be resulting in fewer and fewer people possessing exclusive control over more and more stuff, and the edifices of the law and government will probably continue to reproduce structures which are deleterious to the flourishing of the community, unless there is a radical shift in how we view things - particularly in relation to the basic necessities of life.
That land is fixed, local, just there, and other things are portable is a trivial distinction given that the law treats land just like anything else which can be owned. It just happens to be the thing on which everything else sits - although you can own the sea, the seabed, parts of the sky, and apparently
even the moon. This brings us back to my previous suggestion that the 'ownership' of 'property' is an enforceable claim-to-use. In that light, we should probably prepare for a Moon war!
I know you're not suggesting that nature, or natural selection etc mandate our current conceptions of property and ownership. What they do mandate however is a denial-of-use of basic necessities (and I only keep referring to them because nobody asks to be born and we all require them to continue existing). They mandate suffering through unnecessary hunger, thirst, and exposure, not to mention colonialism, slavery, the exploitation women, environmental degradation, speciesism, and if I carried on with this list I'd be here all day! Sure, there's tens of squillions of years of human physical, psychological, and social development "going on under the hood", nonetheless imho we need to strenuously avoid teleologisms that tell us that we sit at the pinnacle of that development and/or that where we sit today is a natural consequence of that development, or that we were always destined to park our arses here. This is why I am wary of invoking examples of territoriality drawn from nature to explain sets of distinctly human social and economic relations.
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