Have you ever noticed how small assumptions embedded in our language can have huge implications? I was reminded of this at the very end of David Graeber and David Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything. I loved this book even though I found the majority of it deadly boring and it took me forever to get through.
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In the book's conclusion, the Davids mention how our concept of freedom goes all the way back to ancient Rome and Roman law.
Now, why would that ever be problematic?
Well, Rome was of course a slave society. And Roman laws weren't written for slaves, it was written by and for slave masters. This matters.
Because to a slaveholding society, property has no rights because the slavemaster has all the power.
Freedom, in the ancient Roman conception, was based on an individual's power to dispose of his property in whatever way he pleased. The Davids point out that in Roman law property isn't a right because "rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations." This means that property ownership is simply about power. They write, "The blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited 'by force of law.'" This concept of ownership - which survives to this day - means that in ownership and property rights we have a relationship between a person and an object that is "characterized by absolute power."
If I own something, according to this logic, it is my right to destroy it.
Let's say I own a beautiful Faberge egg. Once gifted to the Russian royal family, it is near-priceless and belongs in a museum. But in this example I'm rich, so let's say I bought it for $10 million. Since I now own this egg it is my right to destroy it. If I want I can smash it with a hammer. No one can stop me. It's my right. I can toss this jewel-encrusted egg into the sea, roll it over with the back tires of my Ferrari, or throw it as hard as I can into my mansion's massive roaring fireplace.
Our concept of property rights follows a direct line from slave laws - which in ancient Rome - and the antebellum South - transformed human beings into objects. Slaves had no right to life, no freedom, no more say about what happened to them than my poor smashed-up Faberge egg.
Dawn of Everything points out that Roman slaveholders were free to rape, torture, mutilate, or kill any slave they owned at any time without consequence. There was one small innovation in human rights during the reign of emperor Tiberius. It said that a slaveholder needed permission from a judge before a slave could be ripped apart by wild animals. However, other forms of execution required no such permission.
The Dawn of Everything spends a lot of time comparing and contrasting different North American indigenous societies.
You have probably heard about how the Dutch purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for 60 guilders worth of trinkets - about $1,000 in today's money. There is some question about the accuracy of this story, but the details aren't what matters here. The point is that Native Americans obviously had some very different ideas about what property rights meant.
Untainted by conceptions that had been around since before Caesar, Native Americans obviously didn't have this connection in their minds between ownership and the right to destroy what one owns. It's clear that indigenous societies did not think anyone could "own" nature. They had very different ideas about what ownership meant. Their ideas were closer to what we might call collective ownership, meaning that land for example was owned by everyone and everything that comes into contact with it. Collective ownership also seems to imply a collective responsibility - meaning that there is a shared obligation NOT to ruin or destroy things but to try and preserve them for the generations who come after.
But American chemical companies that dump toxic effluvia into our shared waterways obviously see things differently. Should Exxon or Alcoa have the right to destroy our shared ecosystem because they paid someone for a piece of paper that says they own mineral rights or some parcel of land next to the Ohio River?
Does a person with beachfront property really own every grain of sand right up to the water line? Should a person or company who "owns" a parcel of land for a few years really have the right to render it unusable for decades or even centuries?
Our current conception of property rights says yes. But it is within our power to change that if we want. I know you would never guess - but every generation gets to decide how it wants to run things. The law exists for the living. It's up to us to decide what we want.
Let’s make them pay.