The five-century old cognitive shift we call the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, or simply Modernity, produced an idealism bordering on hubris and delusion at times, the idea that humans were capable of producing a perfectly ordered society, a utopia in the writings of Sir Thomas More. The cognitive shift to post-modernity, only a century old and marked by things like relativity and uncertainty, has left us more than a little cynical about the human capacity for good, but people do still try to create just and ordered communities, sometimes called alternative or intentional community, from co-housing and housing trusts to Christian equivalents of the “kibbutz,” communities united in religious values and committed to shared endeavor.
Humans being humans, though, intentional and alternative communities rarely survive past the first generation, and are never quite as utopian as the founders intended. For example, Arden, Delaware, where I once lived, was artsy and progressive, an experiment in the economics advocated by a guy named Henry George, and influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. In Arden, you own your house, but not the land it sits on, one interpretation of George’s push to tax land, not labor. The people who initially lived in Arden, being self-governed and human, didn’t quite live up to the vision of the founders, so there were sequels, Ardentown and Ardencroft, which were like most sequels, not as good as the original, and maybe best unmade. Still, Arden exists with roughly the same principles more than a century later, which is a raging success by alternative community standards.
Georgist economics predates the digital economy, the immense value attached these days to intangible assets, predates the Ponzi scheme that is finance capitalism, and was conceived before hedge funds and private equity firms. But in an age when those hedge funds are buying up trailer parks and holding the poor hostage for extortionist rents, when so much land is under water or on fire, sometimes in rapid succession, it might be worth re-engaging questions about land, who owns it, and who it benefits.
We begin our service every week by naming the fact that we are on stolen Seneca land, and the ancient Hebrews were in much the same position, sort of. The Books of Joshua and Judges are celebrations of a successful campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing, babies brains smashed against the rocks, the same sort of thing ethnic Russians and the Russian army are doing in Ukraine these days. Fortunately, at least for those ancient Canaanites, we don’t think this really happened, at least not on what is literally a “biblical” scale, though no doubt some were dispossessed and driven out. The Hebrew culture actually appears to be a construction, weaving together Canaanite culture and migrant populations like the Levite escapees from Egypt, with the idea of a racially pure Hebrew monotheism being about as real as the idea of America as a white Christian nation, which is to say, not real and absolutely false.
Still, the idea had power, and land had emotional value far beyond agricultural output and re-sale. The Hebrews told themselves that the land, this land of milk and honey, was given to them by God, and their entire economy was built on small-hold farms and inheritance. This is why, when the King of Israel wanted his vineyard, Naboth said “No. This is my inheritance. I will not sell.” Of course, Queen Jezebel was more than willing to fabricate a false charge against Naboth, ending with the man’s death, so much like the civil asset forfeiture laws in America today, widely abused by corrupt police departments.
Continue reading “25 September 2022: Fixed Star”
