In Defense of Private Property and Tradition

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May 23

Rousseau’s seemingly optimistic theory that man is good in nature (the “noble savage”) but is corrupted by private property and by traditional social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions proved disastrous, leading to the irrational and deadly utopianism of the French Revolution. The French attempt to wipe the slate clean and start over again with new-fangled man-made moralities cut off from what the American Declaration of Independence calls “the laws of nature and nature’s God” led to illegal seizures of property, wholesale slaughter of aristocrats and clergymen (including nuns!), and anti-humanistic social engineering.

On the flip side of Rousseau’s naïve vision of the noble savage stands the darkly pessimistic vision of Thomas Hobbes, who considered life in nature to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, Book I, chapter 13). Thankfully, between these two extremes, the Enlightenment produced two cooler, more prudent thinkers who sought to understand man’s social nature in a manner that squared with things as they really are: John Locke (1632-1704), author of Second Treatise of Government, and Edmund Burke (1729-1797), author of Reflections on the Revolution in France. In these two books, private property and tradition, far from being attacked as the root of social deterioration, are held up as vital supports of freedom and virtue.

For Locke, the state of nature is not inherently brutish and barbaric; indeed, in it, he finds a natural equality and an inbuilt sense of the Golden Rule (Luke 6:31):

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. (Chapter II, section 6)

“We are [God’s] workmanship,” writes Paul, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Ephesians 2:10; KJV). Locke affirms this workmanship and the duties and responsibilities that accompany it, but he adds to it a further dimension. As God’s workmanship, we are also his property; and, as such, we are not the property of anyone else.

Locke’s fellow Enlightenment thinker Kant taught that we should treat other human beings as ends-in-themselves and not as means to some other end. Locke here agrees, though he gives his belief a firmer foundation in the authority of scripture and in the ontological status of man. More than that, Locke uses this biblical teaching to argue further that our equal status as God’s property/workmanship is the basis for our equality with our fellow men. We are made for God’s use and so do not have the right to treat anyone else as property for our own use.

Indeed, the greatest justification for gathering together into a social-political contract by which we cede some of our rights to the government—which, for the anti-monarchical Locke should be to a parliament rather than to a king—is for the mutual protection of private property. Whereas Marx and his heirs, following in the footsteps of Rousseau, would link private property and its possession to theft, Locke links it to our human dignity—to repeat a passage quoted above, “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

Locke defends the right of individuals in a state of nature to engage in what Americans would identify with the iconic vigilante justice of the Wild West. He also defends the death penalty, not just for the sake of retribution and deterrence, but because when we kill a man—or steal his property, which, again, Locke treats as equivalent—we violate the image of God in man. To substantiate this, Locke even quotes Genesis 9:6 “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man” (Chapter II, section 11).

Needless to say, once we gather into a social-political contract and magistrates are appointed to protect citizens and their property, vigilante justice becomes both illegal and unnecessary. Still, the government only remains legitimate as long as it protects the private property of its citizens:

The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. To which in the state of nature there are many things wanting. (Chapter IX, section 124)

To claim that human beings group themselves into political units for the preservation of property is not to imply that we are selfish, greedy narcissists fixated on our wealth. The contract that we participate in guarantees the protection of all property, not just our own. We cede many of our rights and freedoms to governments to create a space where citizens need not fear the arbitrary stripping of their life, liberty, or property. By doing so, we acknowledge that all people have essential value and worth and possess a right to retain that which they have acquired and managed by the labor of their hands.

Homeowners make the best, most loyal citizens, for they are the most fully invested in maintaining a society of law and order that respects the rights and possessions of all citizens. As what Aristotle called political animals, we understand that the making of political contracts is the safest, most effective way to achieve stability without sacrificing personal freedom or individual autonomy. Again, this understanding need not be viewed negatively as emanating from a narrow, looking-out-for-number-one ethos. It reveals, rather, a wish for others to have the same securities we desire for ourselves and an ability to delay gratification now for the greater good.

Locke published his Second Treatise of Government in 1689, one year after England’s peaceful transition of power during the Glorious Revolution. As Locke hoped, the English showed themselves capable of throwing off a monarch (James II) who did not respect their life, liberty, and property in favor of another (William of Orange) who not only respected those things but was willing to invest more power in Parliament as the chief administrator of the rights of the people. Thus were stability, law, and order established in England without stripping citizens of their rights or their possessions.

Exactly a century later, the French launched their own revolution, but it quickly went sour, destroying the very freedoms the revolutionaries had claimed to be fighting for. Although it would take several years before the evils unleashed on July 14, 1789, would become manifest to all, Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman and member of parliament, saw and accurately predicted what its outcome would be in his prophetic Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

While agreeing with Locke that the role of government is to preserve life, liberty, and property for its citizens, Burke emphasizes the role that ordered civilization plays in restraining human passions that ever threaten to tear apart the social and political fabric:

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.

While good governments and magistrates protect property, they do not allow for the free and unbridled reign of passions that dissolve civil order and discourse and so wreak havoc on the nation. The passions of men, both corporately and individually, can easily spur them on to actions that are destructive of liberty and that destabilize the body politic.

For Burke, that necessary restraint on our passions is one of the rights that a just commonwealth provides for its citizens. But that restraint does not, and cannot, rest on abstract principles of justice like the liberty, equality, and fraternity touted by the French Revolution. The restraints that hold back our passions are social, founded on traditions and rituals that unite citizens in a stabilizing fellowship that is tangible and human.

What Burke perceived in the French revolutionaries was a contempt for precisely those traditions and rituals that make us human and that bind us together as creatures made in the image of God who are noble but fallen and who have a capacity for virtue and vice. “This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.”

Man is not an abstract idealogue but a living, breathing human being with a rational, emotional, and spiritual life that refuses to be reduced to impersonal theories that know nothing of his individual loves and desires and fears. To the contrary, in the writings and actions of the revolutionaries, Burke sensed the following:

Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public. Liberty is always to be estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure. Amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society. Embracing in their arms the carcasses of base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime.

Like Rousseau, the French revolutionaries branded the two things that bring stability to commonwealths, property and tradition, the main culprits that needed to be overthrown. According to their anti-humanistic utopian theories, the supports of property and tradition that have long upheld our dignity are nothing but superstitious, ignorant relics of the past that need to be torn down so that a brave new world can rise out of the ashes.

Burke, along with his fellow Englishmen, knew better, for he understood, more acutely than Locke, the subtle web of public and private institutions that protect and support our lives as individuals joined in community.

We are not the converts of Rousseau… We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality… In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals…. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to Parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility.

Social morality is not something that can be mandated, but it also cannot be altered at will by political force. It is something that is instilled in us through a long, slow process of enculturation and practice, a concatenation of inbred sentiments that shape our beliefs and actions and that equip us to respect the life, liberty, and property of ourselves and others.