Disambiguating the concept of "property"

[scotlyn]

In a recent comment on a recent Ecosophia.net blog entry as part of a conversation on the way in which "property rights" can be said to underwrite, or alternatively to undermine, freedom, I said the following:

"jmg – “As for property rights, I’d already suggested that the concept needs reform to stop some of the many abuses we’ve both mentioned and agreed on. How am I missing your point? Help me here.”

"Here is my best shot – and bear in mind I’m only trying to “think in” to the cracks where only weeds grow, because, for sure no one ventures there on purpose…

"Property rights are not possession rights [according to my best effort at disambiguation], and below I lay out the reason I consider this disambiguation necessary.

"Security of possession is what underwrites freedom. (As I believe you agree)

"Security of property, on the other hand, is the entire basis for a legal system written to underwrite legally enforceable claims to acts of DISpossession. (As I do not believe you have heard me say in so many words, despite me saying it several times). Securing dispossessions is, on this reading, not an ABUSE of property rights, but a USE of property rights, precisely as they are written and conceived into law.

"I would like to talk freely with others who are willing to talk with me, about possession rights, and how to secure them, and how that helps to secure freedom, without having to give ground to the kind of property/DISpossession rights we actually have which abolish the freedom of the dispossessed.

"I would be even happier if I could, even once, persuade a person of conservative bent that this is a worhwhile disambiguation effort that exists completely independently of anything to do with socialism, and which, if negotiated and navigated right out there, all hands on board, in open discourse, might result in MORE security of possession, and in MORE freedom, for all of us."

Another commenter, TemporaryReality, asked if I had a blog or such for further discussion, so let this be it.

Please have at it!

Comments

[temporaryreality]

OK, you jumped in deep very quickly. I don't know how to extract deeper meaning yet from "property", " ownership", "possession" so as to exclude power over other people's freedom.

With regard to that, i can see that even the well-intentioned words about "direct connectedness to their personal extentions into the material world respected – a person’s ability to enjoy, without undue external interuption, their connectedness to that which the person inhabits, that which the person makes, that which the person cares for, that which the person maintains, that to which the person’s direct connection could be “sniffed out” by anyone with a dog’s nose..." could be twisted toward the notion of ownership (Imagine a scenario in which someone who "cares for" or "maintains" another claiming authority of ownership, much as slaveowners and male relatives of unattached women did in other times and places).

Perhaps we ought to be casting further afield for other cultural and linguistic options.

I still don't clearly understand (outside my own cultural conditioning), what defines or demarcates property.

ok backtrack

[scotlyn]

Ooops.
I have been thinking about this for so long! And challenging various people (usually right libertarians, but also other rightward thinking people) to show me HOW property rights promote freedom.

The first thing is that property rights only protect property OWNERS. (I'm not even sure if they protect the freedom of property owners, but whatever they do protect, they only protect it when someone owns something). So, how do property rights protect the freedom of non-property owners.

Usually to this question I get an answer to the effect that: "well everyone owns themselves, so there aren't any non-property owners".

But in fact, if you look around there are some people who own a lot of property, and some who own none at all. In fact the vast majority "owe" more than they "own". And did you know that whatever you "owe" is an asset for someone who "owns" that asset?

So, to my mind, if the endpoint is freedom, and property rights only protect property owners, then by definition lots and lots of people, who own no property, or who owe more than their property is worth, have no freedom.


But property rights as we know them are pretty much lifted entire from the Roman law system, so here are some Roman things that are completely consistent with Roman property rights (but not with freedom)
-slavery
-"patriarchal" father-role as "owner" of entire household - wife/wives, children, servants, slaves, everything IN the house and ON the bodies of all those people, including the use of the bodies themselves.

So all my questions proceed from there.

Then there is the way that "property" comes to displace "territoriality" and thus indigenous people everywhere, starting with the indigenous people of Europe, are displaced, dispossessed, cleared from the land, and turned into the proletariats of cities, who become the cheap workforces of the "owners of property" in those cities. So, none of this spells freedom to me.

Re: ok backtrack

[temporaryreality]

On ecosophia, when you mentioned disposession, my mind went immediately to people dispossessed of their homelands (the world over) - interesting, though, that JMG didn't see that (or didn't indicate that he had).

Have you ever read Ursula LeGuin's "Always Coming Home"? She sets up opposing cultures, one in which the relationship of person to other being or thing is not one of ownership or possession, though there is hereditary, customary use of places or things, and the other (which makes little sense to the former) that owns things. A telltale marker is the phrase "my __[wife, house, etc.]" which is completely nonsensical to people from the former culture.

As I started in on the "Local Culture" issue, I was stopped from proceeding very quickly by the assumption that property is crucial to freedom. We lightly discussed the "meaning" of property here (at my house) but when I stated that I didn't know how I felt about property, my husband had his position rattled (he sees purchase and rental of houses as a livelihood option better than his current [admittedly bad] work situation) -- which I found fascinating, because I wasn't arguing anything, just trying to understand what I thought of the concept and what it entails. Like I said, babyteeth but it quickly leads to people thinking you're claiming a position when in actuality there's just an attempt being made to understand concepts.

Check out the circularity here:

Property: something owned or possessed; the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing: Ownership; something to which a person or business has a legal title.

Ownership: the state, relation, or fact of being an owner.
Owner: one who owns.
Own: to have or hold as property: Possess; to have power or mastery over.

Possess: (related to potent/having power): to have and hold as property.

Title: all the elements constituting legal ownership.

***

I fully agree with your endeavor and that this needs unpacking because the unquestioned assumptions that come with this set of words mean something and then get piled on with people's personal definitions (kind of like the left/right socialism/social___ discussed on ecosophia. I also agree with Mathias Gralle that "left" and "right" are no longer useful (and since when has JMG called himself "on the right"? Maybe I was mistaken that he considered himself more centrist, but that's neither here nor there).

Re: ok backtrack

[scotlyn]

Lol! I know what you mean by babyteeth, and man, I have been pushing this for so long, but getting so little useful in response, that my own thinking is ALSO still pretty babyteeth. I mean if I go back to my first comment on JMG's blog, and my last, there is quite a bit of hard thinking in the progression from one to the other. And, as you say, you tentatively hazard a thought and it is assumed that behind this thought there is a whole worked out plan. But, guess what, I haven't got one.

But, I'm very happy to hear you confirm that this is, indeed, a troubling assumption. The one that says "Property is crucial to freedom." I mean I really, really, like what the "Local Culture" boys, and Wendell Berry, and the distributists, are trying to do - critiquing both capitalism and socialism - and I certainly think their magazines are worth reading. But I tend to get lost in navigating around the abstractions of labels, which are changeable in any case, and I know that I need to get more "behind the stage" looks at what people's thought processes are.

I have to say I was a wee bit set on the back foot by JMG's stock talking point answers, initially, but now I see that he is getting to grips with the material, and that is essentially what I need. I need to hear from conservatives, especially, what they think freedom is. I mean, I often DO find myself on the same page - for example, medical autonomy. But, when they keep insisting they have to have "property rights" (which so often means the right to "hold" property made of other people or of goods made by extinguishing other people's freedom) to get it, then I find myself on a different page.

I need to find out if there is really such a barrier between my concept of freedom and theirs so as to be unbridgeable, or if it is just semantics.

And I cannot make any headway in finding this out, if no one will join in.

So, I really appreciate that you're here.

Have you made any further progress in the household discussions? I admit, there is a downside to being a landlord for the "small" kind - renting one or two houses/apartments. It is true that tenants can totally mistreat or destroy their rentals, even if not many of them do, but if you only have one or two properties and end up with a bad tenant you COULD be in for a world of hurt, instead of a reliable stream of income.

But most renters do not deal with small landlords (even though, in aggregate, there are more small than large landlords). The landlords that own the largest number of dwellings, are large property companies and vulture funds, who leverage their portfolios in various ways to keep rents high and costs low.

I do hope your husband, and yourself, can find work situations that are better. It is extremely hard to have the luxury to work for oneself. I'm in a changeover situation myself, since I left my paid employment last March (a plan I had made in December of last year) to work exclusively for myself. I was about to go all out to build up my home clinic when - Boom! - I had to close until July. There was a Covid payment, but also frustration. I gradually got the clinic going again and then - Boom! - a second close down. but this time, my professional association did push, and win, a concession for us acupuncturists to be able to call ourselves "essential". So now, for the past three weeks, I am working and exceeding my break even target of 10 patients a week! Yay! And, all going well, the mortgage will get paid off in a year or so. And that, to me, means (topic of discussion) - Freedom! Nothing of mine that any creditor can take from me!

So, best wishes with all your cares and concerns and intentions - to both of you!

Re: ok backtrack

[temporaryreality]

I too hope the conversation continues - and wish the others who'd chimed in had popped over here. (Maybe bring it up one more time if you feel so inclined as there won't be another ecosophia open post until Feb.).

I can't help but wonder if the 'zeitgeist' found in this month's comment thread - of a strand of the thought being about terms and how they're defined and how people use them - is a result of so much in the world being topsy-turvy and the boundaries between once-obvious differences blurred to almost meaninglessness. Is this the ultimate destination of post-modernism - that things mean only what each person says they mean? Anyway, that's tangential, but I do see it as relevant to your line of questioning and my wondering what the words even mean when all they do is refer to each other.

From a spiritual point of view, can we "own" anything? Do we not just use what we have access to, ultimately? I wonder about agency - does a forest or an animal resident of a forest not have agency in spite of a legal title of ownership held by a human? You spoke of owning your farm and your farm owning you. Can you own a sheep? Does a sheep want to be owned? I suppose without your ownership, the sheep wouldn't last long under the weight of its wool and the perhaps limitation in grazing land... do humans then, having domesticated sheep for their current characteristics, own sheepness.

Does ownership always imply responsibility?

Interesting that we (broadly speaking, modern Western, etc.) are part of a culture that wishes to NOT have responsibility: we cannot figure out a socially-approved method of maintenance of the built environment better than encouraging new constructions to generate revenue, to build 20-year buildings of commerce, and then to ignore them when they fail and become decrepit.

We throw the things we own "away".

Sorry, I'm not quite up to the "freedom" end of the discussion and am still working with ownership/property/possession. :)

The discussion didn't get very far on our end, and it was interesting to hear our daughter's viewpoint - she trends toward but contends with the in-practice limitations of more "socialist" directions in an attempt to try to theorize what would allow for more equitable access to "property" like houses.

As for the long-term plan, I do appreciate your well-wishes. He currently has employment and thankfully it doesn't require that he be on-site, though the underlying systemic nature of the work (an academic squeezed out of the domestic market - yikes!) is such that we know it's only a matter of time before it's gone and that abuses will continue since they know he's in a weak position.

I'm glad to hear that you've been allowed to reopen your clinic and that it helps move you closer to freedom from debt!

Re: ok backtrack

[scotlyn]

I appreciate your conversation. I think that what was happening on the main thread probably went as far as it could for a first outing in terms of questions. I don't think I'll repeat the invitation, because I think I, and others, probably will do better for giving it a rest.

But I looked again at your set of definitions, and you are quite right in thinking the circle of terms that defines property and owning is thoroughly self-referential.

On the one hand, I myself benefit enormously from the fact that we (my husband and I) share legal title to our farm. We also almost have full legal title to our house, although there is a wee bit left on our mortgage (around 14 or 15 more months). But sharing equity in your house with a bank can be extremely risky, as far too many people have discovered on the the downslope since the bank crisis. I am extremely thankful that at the mortgage shopping stage, among the options we considered and were approved for (not any of the main banks as our resources were very intermittent), the one we chose turned out to be the best of all deals. One of the other ones was a straight "subprime" lender who has spent all of the post-crisis period repossessing.

I am also grateful to have a trade I can practice from home and find customers for.

So by rights I should be in the "hurray for property rights" team. But, as you say, I wonder where we are mired, metaphysically, when we can turn almost everything - and maybe almost everyone - into a saleable commodity. I don't think the sheep think of themselves as owned (nor would they like it if they did). I think they see us as an unavoidable environmental hazard, turning up sometimes to move them from one place to another - a relief when the old grazing has got short. Very occasionally to give them a medicine they probably don't enjoy, and also to be around and help with lambing. In the winter they follow my husband around with interest because he will arrange food in the feeders. But mostly they have a life of their own, they have friendships and gangs, and arguments among themselves and shifting alliances, and different personalities. Their daily interactions are mainly with each other and with the other wildlife about the place. As for myself, I don't think we own them, I think we "husband" them or "shepherd" them, which is a two-way relationship. Not the kind you'd have with other people, but very much a relationship.

Ownership does not imply ANY responsibility. Our legal title to this land means that we could legally dig up all the topsoil and sell it, cut down all the trees and sell them, spread enough chemicals on it to kill everything in sight. This would be consistent with ownership. But not with husbandry or care or with a set of relationships in which we are participants.

Well, freedom is a hard concept. I suppose it is the irony of people telling me over and over how fundamental to freedom it is to be able to own property, while not being able to come up with convincing reasons why that property cannot be human property, inconsistent with freedom, that has troubled me for years. I should maybe just get over that.

Anyway, none of this is easy to think about at the best of times, but when people are wound up by the general state of things, as they are, it is way harder.

I hope your daughter and her friends are also working on these problems - because it is a fact that there is a lot less housing availability for her generation and that of my sons.

Best wishes.

Re: ok backtrack

[temporaryreality]

Sorry, I ran out of time the last day or so... and this might be unnaturally superficial because of it, but I'm interested in this expressed dichotomy:

"Ownership does not imply ANY responsibility"
vs.
"ownership" in "direct connectedness to ...personal extensions into the material world" that then includes "a person’s ability to enjoy, without undue external interruption, their connectedness to that which the person inhabits, that which the person makes, that which the person cares for, that which the person maintains, that to which the person’s direct connection could be “sniffed out” by anyone with a dog’s nose."

You've somehow inserted responsibility into the mix :)

Re: ok backtrack

[scotlyn]

Oh yes, re Le Guin - actually no. I have read many, many of hers, but not that one. *adds to list*

:)