Imagine
We all know the words. The song that originated with John Lennon and the Beattles is played on almost every classic rock radio station, but I often trip over the words in my thoughts. I suspect that if people listened to the lyrics a bit more closely, that song would get a lot less radio and streaming than it currently does, but that’s a bit of an aside.
I don’t want to talk about the entire song right now. I want to talk about this phrase:
Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can.
I want to talk about this because I’ve been diving deep into the history of my nation, the United States, and struggling with some knowledge that I didn’t have before, not because it wasn’t available, but because I didn’t know to look for it. Specifically, I’m talking about Aristotle.
My philosophical journey began with Plato. I somehow bypassed Aristotle’s connection to politics because I jumped at one point from greek philosophy to the Enlightenment, from which the basic tenets were traced through John Locke to the Bible, and to Montesque, and other contemporaries who were themselves steeped in religion. I did know that ancient Rome had influence on the enlightenment thinkers (as well as United States founders), but I didn’t know the true extent of it, or that they’d gone so far as to dive into greek philosophy, like Aristotle…though I should have known.
Here’s my confusion, and to a point, my discomfort. Aristotle was a wealthy man. This is known, so I won’t go into it too much, but he had money, power, and powerful friends. This was likely one of the reasons he had the time and interest to think deeply about politics and how states behave or ought to behave. But being wealthy, as were the founders of the United States, he was influenced to protect his wealth. Aristotle is one of the earliest to theorize on the nature of private property, a common thread throughout western civilization.
I’ve recently been reading Friedrich Engels, who studied the Greeks, and compared them to the Iroquois, in the 1800s. His work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, indicated that property ownership, up to and including private property, is a mark of civilization advance. He went so far as to suggest that the Iroquois people were in an earlier stage of civilization in part because of how they treated property, among other things, based on the fact that the ancient greeks were considered an earlier phase of western civilization development. So far, so good, right?
Except, his writing assumes that without British influence, which definitely marked a turning point in native American civilizations, the Iroquois would have arrived at similar property concepts on their own. This has to be believed, in order to fully accept the evolution of civilization, or that evolution as a concept even makes sense in terms of civilization, the way Engels describes it. Don’t mistake me. Engels makes a lot of very astute observations about human nature, and consanguinity he explores in depth. From a comparison angle, the similarities between the Iroquois and ancient Greeks is curious, indeed. But the inevitability of evolution is what I’m less convinced, as I am unconvinced that Socialism is an inevitable next step as his compatriot Marx believed. (To be fair, Engels points out in the beginning that he’s not suggesting evolution in a direct sense, but he spends a disproportionate amount of time arguing for it in the course of his work while doing a masterful job of dismissing those who contend, equally wrongly, that the Indians of America had no structure to their society and no gods).
This evolutionary assessment is what makes me think about Lennon. I’m not as convinced. If you’re not familiar, the Iroquois were at the time a confederacy of multiple tribes. These tribes, through kinship lines and similar languages, had formed treaties with each other and the confederacy had very specific customs and rules to operate within it. Within the confederacy when first encountered by the British, much of what we consider private property was shared. Engels argues that the transition he observed from widely-shared property to more and more private property was an indication of evolution, and would have happened without British interference. To this I argue that those customs may have ultimately arrived at a conclusion of private property, but perhaps not. Perhaps there are other ownership models that might have arisen without a neighbor bent one day on your destruction, and the next asking for help.
Why does it matter? Like Donald Bloxham suggests in his History and Morality, 2020, suggesting that civilization advance culminates in whatever condition your society is in is a bit leading the witness. Similarly, to then suggest that a civilization advances independently of influence of its trading partners is also questionable. In fact, to suggest that western civilization is the pinnacle of civilization advancement is an interesting question, as I’m not sure anyone has determined yet what “advancement” of society actually means, who was looking at it from a truly objective position.
Case in point: Roanoke. This was well before the period being discussed above, but worth looking at. In the New World, not yet the United States, the people from the advanced civilization put a satellite community in the New World, and couldn’t, despite their advanced society, keep them alive. The current citizens of the New World, referred to then as Indians, did well enough by comparison.
Therefore, I have to ask the question: what is the purpose of society? I’d suggest it is no more or less than to improve life for the people within it. Once having been purposefully established, then second, and a distant second at that, is the need to persist. Looked at in that order, I must wonder whether we hit a local maxima? Did we take a wrong turn with this private property stuff? Because a terrific amount of modern western society is based on the concept of private property. Consider the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as a paraphrasing of “life, liberty, and property” from the philosopher John Locke (Two Treatises…). To get to a personal right of property, Locke takes a rather circuitous route through biblical beliefs.
Aristotle was more practical, so it’s unclear why Locke takes the journey he believes he must (save, perhaps, that the entire world he lived in was marked by the murders of disbelievers or wrong-believers). Aristotle based his belief in private property partly on the observation that there is more bickering involved when property is shared. This we can easily see when children are asked to share, and subsequently fail at it.
As a wealthy man, Aristotle would have been blind to what I saw growing up as a child. What I saw was people who have nothing offering a place to stay for relatives or people they knew who were in need. What I saw was a system of communal property, that everyone pretended was something else. Need a cup of sugar? “Borrow” one from your neighbor. Can’t afford child care and need to go to work? Your neighbor leans in the help out, offering their property to your use (after all, where will the children stay?). I tend to believe that what Aristotle observed, and what many with wealth may have observed as well, is that people with wealth—that is, people who have made a habit of acquisition and hoarding—fight over material possessions.
My point in all of this is to say that more than not, history is written and prioritized by those who are left standing to write it. This means that western civilization has quite a lot to say about history, but we must be clear that most of what’s been written, even among perceived philosophical revolutionaries like Engels, comes with it the heavy baggage of a western-civilization-centric world view. Other than military might, in a world that professes to have beliefs beyond might making right, what gives western civilization the ability to claim itself the most advanced society, in what that society does for its members?
I can almost imagine no possessions. But it took me a lifetime to get to this point, diving deeply into philosophy and history to gain a better understanding of those things which we hide from ourselves, while trying to eek out a career that would feed my self and family. Given the amount of self-work it took to get to this point, what I can’t imagine is how we as a society will ever release our grasp on some of these ideas that have been locked into the past enough to challenge them. But others can and are working to see if different models of ownership can work, even here in the United States. Perhaps we will all in the near future be able to imagine no possessions when enough time passes.
Here are some communities (not an endorsement, more of a curiosity at this point) which eschew or minimize property ownership. I intend to research these and others in the coming months, with one question - how’s it going?
