Seattle, a leader of the Suquiamish tribe on the Pacific coast, is widely believed to have delivered the following speech around 1851:
The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky, the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the presence of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred people. Every shining pine needle. Every sandy shore. Every mist in the dark woods. Every meadow. Every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap that courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. Perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong in the same family. The shining water that moves in streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land you must remember it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of the memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the river the kindness you would give any brother. If we sell our land, remember that the air is precious to us. The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children, that earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of earth. This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself. One thing we know, our God is also your God. The earth is precious to Him. And to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires. Where will the thicket be? Gone. Where will the eagle be? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt, the end of living and the beginning of survival? When the last red men has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left? We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So if we sell our land love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it as God loves us all we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us, it is also precious to one thing we know, there is only one God. No man, be he red or white, can be apart. We are brothers, after all.1
B. Property and Other Early Modern Preoccupations
Making due allowances for its rhetorical elements and its possibly spurious provenance, and recognizing that the various peoples and tribes of Amerindia hardly constituted a uniform and homogeneous culture, this passage is still interesting for its point of view. It speaks of a very different perspective of ownership and the meaning of material possession, although it should be noticed that it does reflect some sense of ownership. Whatever the real source of its ideas, the speech recognizes a universal human kinship and suggests the observation of group or territorial entitlement.
There exists as well a powerful note of despair, due to the recognition of the inevitability of the victory of might over whatever the claims to right. This follows from the fact that, given the other things he says about the disappearance of his people and his world, Seattle would surely not have acceded to the sale, thereby extinguishing the territorial claims of his people, without terrible compulsion. The ideas of property and human kinship are all of special note because so much of the preoccupations of the Early Enlightenment were situated around the concept of property and other kinds of entitlement. Indeed, it is in the 16th and 17th Centuries that our modern notions of possession, personal and national, and of basic human rights, achieved form. These conceptions do not rise out of a formless void, however, but are part of a continuous tradition, one manifested variously at different times and in different epochs, in terms of use and interpretation. Whatever the differences in detail and sometimes in substance among persons and historical intervals, there exists, at core, a way of viewing social relationships, a dialogue about the use and abuse of personal and political power. This dialogue has continued, although an often interrupted one, from the Greeks to the present. It frames much of contemporary debate.
When first encountering a new and different culture, individuals sometimes subsequently come to better understanding their own. Contrast brings to the surface social assumptions, making tacit understandings overt and revealing deeply hidden but powerfully directing cultural patterns. There are times within cultures where individuals and groups are similarly affected. The Italian Renaissance was such a moment, reaching different parts of Europe to a greater or lesser extent, rapidly or slowly, but over time transforming Europe irreversibly. France, Germany, England and the present Netherlands underwent the most dramatic changes first. It is in these countries that modernity was born out of the revival of classical learning. The geographically uneven decay of Feudalism, the massive infusion of Classical Knowledge, including Phyronian skepticism, moved members of a rising intellectual elite to pose new questions, even if they were at times barely understood and badly formulated.
This movement included a set of new or renewed concerns about the nature of human life and the place of political power in it. "Where does political power originate?" "Who should possess it?" "Is it conditional or absolute?" "If it is conditional, what are its restrictions? "What is political power?" "What is its highest expression?" "Is there a moral difference between having power and having it legitimately?" How should authority be generated and how should it be maintained? These are among the problems posed. As an aside, it is interesting to notice certain questions that are not asked, such as just what should constitute the basis for a political arrangement; there is a tacit understanding that it should be the Nation State.
Well before the Renaissance, it had been generally recognized that there is an intimate connection between the possession of political power and the power to make and enforce laws. During this time, the connection receives a renewed focus from which a series of further problems arose. "What is law?" "What is its source? "What, if any, are its limits?" "What distinguishes a genuine law from near relatives and more importantly, from spurious declarations that merely simulate genuine legal imperatives?" Then come those questions that arrive out of the speculative resolutions of the political theorists and European exposure to indigenous culture. In the confluence of events which determined the genesis of the modern West was the discovery of the Americas; the expansion of Commercial Capitalism, accompanied by the increasing power of the group that made it work; and the coming to be of the Nation State. These carried whole sets of entailments and puzzles. For solutions some looked to Worlds, only imagined and newly thought up, others turned to the past. Most did both. The late Renaissance period witnessed the French jurist and political theorist Jean Bodin, asking a number of things about the nature of power and its limits. For instance; Why it is not legitimate to kill strangers who have committed no civic offence. This question seems strange to contemporary eyes. If, however, the obligation to treat others as one would wish to be treated stops at the limit of the tribe kin or city boundaries, then any alien other might appear as fair game to be used according to whim.
Aristotle and later the Stoics had supplied theoretical reasons against such killing. They argue that there is a kinship among those sharing a common nature and that the demand of justice that equals should be treated equally precluded dealing with outsiders differently from citizens in respect to the basic
concerns of life and liberty. Then as now, the stranger was to have due protection of law but was much restricted in terms of other civic liberties. Even given these restrictions, Aristotle proposed another dodge, one that, unhappily, has seen much use historically. He suggested that there exist higher and lower
human natures, that some are fit for no more than slavery. This concept of the subhuman, whether articulated or merely assumed, has even in this Century allowed many to do the otherwise unthinkable. Review the "Rape of Nanking. Even in the advanced nations of today individuals may forfeit, by criminal act, a citizens rights, including the right to life.
The early Moderns struggled with this problem of conditions of forfeit and applications. "May prisoners of war be legitimately summarily executed" as the Afghans did recently with many captured Soviets and as the Soviets paid back in kind? "May Civilians suspected of aiding an enemy be murdered en masse" as happened at Mai Lai during the conflict in Vietnam? "What is the status of captured territory after a war? "May individuals, supposing that slavery is acceptable, sell themselves into bondage?" "What does possession mean in a captured territory after a war? "What does possession mean in respect to the oceans, in respect to territories not controlled by Nation States?"
Many of these problems were just barely beginning to be articulated by such persons as Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke in their several countries. Yet in one way or another, their attempts to find resolution, a struggle which continues on some fronts today, created contemporary political understanding. All, however, believed there must be limits to political power.
C. Some British Contributions
For whatever reasons, Anglo - American philosophers have in the past tended to ignore what was happening in Northern Europe during this period, except for England. Both Hobbes and Locke receive almost exclusive attention. Because of his influence on the development the American Constitution, Locke, in particular and his arguments for democracy in general, are taken to be either the most influential of the Early Moderns or nearly so, in terms of the casting of liberal political theory. This is not in error but it is over simplistic by reason of what is, as will be seen, left out. Apart from ethnocentricity, the importance given Locke is not simply due to his progressive, from one point of view, democratic theories but because of certain of his other concerns that resonate to the present. Chief among these concerns is that which will be a recurring consideration throughout this work: property.
The idea of property is as much a preoccupation of the several historical periods, as the ideas of "justice" and a "just law". There were controversies about the meaning of property in medieval religious circles. Aquinas recognized that the institution of property, as a construct, has immense existential consequence. For the Medievals as for many persons today, physical possession may determine the very possibility of life as well as its quality.
Ownership confers to the individual not only the means for existence but often, social value and a variety of freedoms. Historically these have included both political rights and franchise. Indeed, the idea is so powerful that it comes to serve as a model for defining many personal relations, relations not, it should be noticed, strictly and naturally analogous to that of an individual and his or her physical possessions.
Disputes about the meaning of property do not begin in the West with the Early Moderns but with the growth of Commercial Capitalism renewed interest in the issues of property and wealth they receive critical notice and were transformed. Not land but money, ownership of the means of production and letters of credit were coming to constitute the representations and tokens of wealth and with this emerges a relocation of political and social power. The confluence of ideas and events involving wealth, power and political franchise, most saliently come together in England. Here the conditions providing the power of the moment for social revolution were most keenly met. It is then hardly surprising that property, given its multidimensional functions, had the place it does in the writings of John Locke. This was noticed particularly in Marxist and socialist circles, to the detriment of Locke's liberalism. However, whatever the logical connection between Locke's notion of property and his other key concepts, the yoking together of ideas that may not be strictly harmonious due to the influence of cultural determinants is the rule for political theorists. What is more interesting is the way those determinants give specific cast to a key idea. His conception of personal property differs, it may be noted, radically from what is known about the conceptions of ownership shared by the various tribes of Amerindia and elsewhere. Locke probably emphasizes this institution in the way that he does because of his class interest and identification, but also because of his theory of what it means to be human. Political ideas may be shaped from "above" as well as "below". This is surely true of Locke and the price he pays is a level of incoherence in his system. But by his inclusion of idiosyncratic considerations, such as self or class interest, he introduces critical concerns which are left out of many abstract contemporary philosophical accounts. Overtly or tacitly, he recognizes the irreducible impact of the presence of the non rational in human affairs. Locke is neither a 19th Century Romantic nor a 20th Century Existentialist. He does not believe that human beings may develop themselves, in a given time and place, or in an uncountable large number of ways, nor does he believe each of us is fully responsible for what we become. However, he does accept that human agents may approximate and are capable of development of right patterns within the limits of their situation. He accepts that conditions for any such progression are, in part, material. He tacitly assumes that in order to develop humanly we must not be in a position of reacting only to brute necessity. A degree of affluence allows proper development and that affluence is in turn created by our focused activity. We may, will and work towards the means of betterment. The ideal of social progress is not yet fully born. Locke may have been prepared to exclude the majority of male Englishmen from political enfranchisement because of their lack of education and the leisure time necessary to make reasonable political judgments, but there is nothing to suppose he saw this as a permanent or desirable state of affairs.
It is not necessary to assert any direct causal linkage about Locke's notions of property, the evolution of the idea of egoistic liberalism2, and the inalienable right to private ownership. Perhaps he was only giving sharp articulation to a notion shared by many others of his time, place and economic status, and he surely was not able to foresee the evolution of this institution to its present position in advanced Capitalism. Still, he does put much emphasis on private wealth as a condition of full political entrenchment, social "health" and the possibility of the good life. In doing this he codifies a widely accepted but theoretically unexpressed notion. This has multidimensional implications. It is easy to see, for example, that if Europeans generally held his theory, at the time of massive emigration to North America. Then what looks from one vantage point like a case of massive theft could be rationalized, on the basis of this theory, by even those of strict conscience. Since the Amerindian had no Nation state and no private property, there was nothing the Europeans did which could constitute territorial theft. Such thinking has a long European heritage, both as type and as token. The Crusaders might slaughter the Jews, Moslems, men, women and infants in Jerusalem, because they lacked the human value of those with true religion. Similarly the Jews of Spain and earlier of England had their property seized and underwent mass expulsion on the same grounds. The recent conflict in the former Yugoslavia provides depressingly contemporary examples of the same sort of rationalization. Still, against this tradition and against those proclivities, Hobbes first identifies, as the egotistical and group selfishness, driving human affairs; there are the voices that say, "might does not make right."
D. The Idea of an Ethical Limit as the Backdrop for Social Ethics
There are those who say that, even if the state had power to do anything in treating others, including alien and foreign others, only some kinds of treatment are acceptable. The exercise of power must be restricted by a set of considerations that distinguish the "ought" from the "can".
Historically and ontically, before concerns with property, with rights and correlative obligations, before puzzles about the meaning of law, there exists a central ethical question, "If I have the power to do x and I want to do x, is there any reason I should not do x?" The short answer, coming out of the European tradition, is that under some conditions there are many reasons not to do x. This conclusion is supported by two distinct but often interacting theoretical lines. One says, "I should not do x if I can see it is to my overall or long term disadvantage.", the other says, "I should not do x if I see it is wrong." Contextualizing the interplay and outcomes of these traditions requires going beyond an analysis that only teases out proposition and entailment. Contextualization demands a reconstruction of the configurations that generate supposition and propositional attitude. Since it is not possible to extract pure context from historical data, it is necessary to conjecture about the perceived and real role of artificial constraints in human affairs.
With their demand for the testable and reproducible, positivism and a strict empiricism are too sterile and over determining in their requirements to allow this investigation. On the other hand rationalism, such as Kant's, precludes any sort of objectivity of real process. Immanuel Kant proposed that we construct the World by shaping the given set of universal categories according to a species. This is probably wrong ontologically but nevertheless his supposition captures something of large importance about human knowing. We experience much of the World through a grid of cultural presuppositions and social assumptions. Many Europeans believed they had the true religion and many seemed to suppose also that superior technology is the mark of a superior humanity. Against the infidel and the pagan, all is fair. There were others, at least a few, who demanded that the "ought" be distinguished from the "can even in the treatment of the truly alien. Their reasons came either through Christianity or from the Natural Law tradition. Their voices were scarcely heard against the gathering impetus of an ongoing cultural revolution. Ethical norms exist at any given time as a sub category of a much larger group of cultural preoccupations. These revolve around the relations among property, wealth and power as a function of the reorganization of knowledge and technological mastery. Education and skill, accumulating wealth and private property, and a focus on the secular and the material, mark this cultural transformation. The acquisition of knowledge often gave its possessor not only wealth but an ability and an interest in political process. Especially in England, rulers came to rely on the growing merchant class for wealth; they in turn came to see the necessity of curtailing the power of the State. Participation in the political and legal process was a way of protecting accumulated wealth from the predations of kings. Individual interests multiplied, gave birth to class interests, and group solidarity ultimately shifted the centre of social power. Property as an instrument and an artifact gave the exercise of power a point, achieving the means necessary to it. Group activity and industrial process became the model of the operation of matter in motion. The idea of property provides a way of mapping, of understanding human interaction, both as given and ideal. For example, Locke, following Grotius, sees the relation of the individual to his or her own life as a property relation; the possession of ones life creates a standing entitlement or right. He sees the relation of God to person as that of maker to product; so, for instance, murder is theft and trespass. The very contemporary idea of "my body is my property" likely has its source in this way of thinking, and so the old debate about self alienation, where alienation originally means a literal dispossession, selling the "meum" into slavery, is not so logically peculiar after all. Circumstances drive the need to redefine cultural institutions and this redefinition alters circumstances.
Discussions about property existed before Locke's time of course. The Middle Ages saw a series of debates about the moral status of property, occasioned by vows of poverty, and the contrast between private ownership and the communal possessions of the monasteries. These contributed to the early modern formulations but the issues had by then come to achieve a much greater import. Under many forms of human arrangement something similar to the notion of private possession is, it seems, a practical necessity. With the rising middle classes of early modernity, the accumulation of wealth became the very point of much of life. Locke is not only important for what he says but for what he represents. Locke did not invent the cultural norms that gave rise to industrial capitalism but he reflected and distilled some of them to the point that made him become thoroughly identified with this capitalism. His detractors, such as G. B. Macpherson, identify him with "possessive individualism," and his liberal admirers, such as Robert Nozick, begin talking about right order with a discussion of property and entitlement. Both views distort Locke; still, it is not accidental that he can be interpreted in such a way.
E. Locke, Limits, and National Law
What Locke has to say must be seen against his general theory of human nature, and the idea of the relation of entitlement to right order. To do this it is necessary to define and to trace the evolution of certain key notions. If this writers interest were simply that of a sort of conceptual archeologist or historian of ideas, bringing to the surface the meaning of these notions, perhaps it would be adequate. The larger interest is to consider the legitimacy of these ideas and to argue in favor of a tradition that is both unique and worthy of preservation.
It is an irony, or would be if he had actually delivered it, that Chief Seattle's speech includes themes which are sympathetic to many contemporary ears. He speaks as a "deep" ecologist and his speech contains many ideas that are incompatible with widely entrenched cultural norms of his own time. After several centuries during which these norms constituted the dominant ideal, they demanded the greatest possible mastery and possession of the physical world; and in some variants, the control of human individuals. All process is construed as machine process, and this is what makes such control possible. According to this ideal, outside the self nothing has intrinsic value; all exists as instruments. This ideal begins with the notion of physical process as machine process but was anticipated by such Renaissance thinkers as Leonardo da Vinci, who spoke often of such organisms as birds in terms of instruments. Mechanism thoroughly captured the imagination of the European intelligentsia but was not the only guiding concept.
The "discovery" of the Americas and of its indigenous peoples, partly made possible by mechanism, struck the European imagination with great vivacity. It impacted with particular liveliness on political theory, reviving both skepticism and the notion of cultural relativity. This is clear even in some of the less known works of Locke. Still various thinkers concatenated similar cultural ingredient in various ways to various effects.
F. Interpretation, Limits, Context, and Cultural Evolution
Unlike Hobbes and the majority of contemporary analytic philosophers, but similarly to Chief Seattle, Locke considered political relations against the background of a Spiritual or God centered Cosmos. He framed the new against some very old ethical categories. There existed for him a designing intelligence. This critically shaped the way he saw persons, jurisprudence and political institutions. His beliefs gave his theory a meaning it could not have had otherwise but it must be noted that even those who share his general conception do not necessarily arrive at his conclusions.
Cultural premises, unlike a well formed logical calculus, do not lead inevitably to a single set of conclusions. A seemingly slight divergence in weighing or evaluating fact may lead to profound differences in the way the World is interpreted and thus, in turn, to the prescription of corrective policies to cure its imperfections or incompleteness. Locke, for example, has much in common with the Dutchman Hugo Grotius yet Locke theorized shortly after Grotius and with a different set of interests and a different epistemology. Even though they began from broadly similar premises, Locke proposed to reform political process in a manner Grotius would not have recognized. Pufendorf, who comes historically between them, shares similarities with both yet his system also contains unique elements, some of which will be examined in detail later on.
