Being and Possession

There I was, happily reading along, thinking that I had found a new best friend, a soul-mate with whom to explore the mysteries of home and the ways we live in and are shaped by this primary space of ours, when bam!, I slammed into a teaching that shocked me.

(Okay, so Peter King won't be my new best friend, but I do want to thank him for treading the same path as I am and clearing away much of the underbrush that would, no doubt, otherwise trip me up.)

In speaking about the necessity of calling home "mine" (albeit a "mine" that is often regularly and gracefully shared with others who also call it "mine"), and about how the ability to exclude others is a necessary attribute of home, King (in his book, In Dwelling) goes on to quote, approvingly, Roger Scruton on the nature of possessing:

“Ownership is the primary relations through which man and nature come together."

"Through property man imbues the world with will, and begins therein to discover himself as a social being… "

"[Through ownership] the object is lifted out of mere ‘thinghood’ and rendered up to humanity.”

These quotes come, appropriately, from Scruton's book called The Meaning of Conservatism (2001) and as much as they shocked me in the context of King, they also offer a keen insight into the challenges environmentalists face as we work to bring a more humble ideology of stewardship, tenancy, and usufruct back into western thought.

For Scruton, humans and nature (as if humans were not in their very being a part of nature!) come to into relationship only when humans reach across the divide to possess and impose their will upon nature. Scruton is using his school of philosophy to mend a breach between humans and nature that his school of philosophy created in the first place!

Spiritual environmentalists might counter Scruton's thinking with Psalm 24:1 as an anthem: "The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein."

In this view, humans and nature are part and parcel of God's creation, of nature. We enter relationship with each other through this mutual awareness, mutual status. We do not need to possess and subdue nature to enter into relationship.

And nature does not need us to lift it out of its indignity of "thinghood." In the narrative of creation, God made the world and at each step, before we humans ever came on the scene, the world was declared: good.

The first humans were given permission to use, indeed were charged with the task of using, the resources of the world to create home. But permission to use - which is an expression of relationship - is not the same as permission to own. Nor does 'use' necessarily mean to manipulate, change, handle or manhandle. I "use" the view of the tree outside my window although I never even touch it. I "use" you, my readers and audience, in this joyous semi-anonymous communication as my muses. Were it not for you, I would not be writing this, but I do not own you in any way. Nor, after writing these words, do I "own" them. Nor do you "own" the internet, though you most certainly use it.

Possession is not, then, the foundation of social being (although it is a prelude to enhancing or confounding it). Simply being in the presence of another, including nature, is.

And then the question becomes, now what ought I do?