EARNEST, IF NOT DEFT:

Technology and the Spirit of Ownership (Paul J. Cella III, Summer 2005, New Atlantis)

Technology, we must remember, is a form of human splendor; it is the produce of human ingenuity interacting with the natural world. But technology also presents us with its own novel challenges, including the obscuring of its own causes. In part by design, technology distances the user from the maker by a series of mechanical intermediaries. I use a computer virtually every day of my life, but my understanding of how the machine works is embarrassingly minimal. When there is a problem with it, the solution is usually the same: “Call Tech Support.” This experience is surely familiar to many Americans. It suggests both our impotence and our sense of entitlement: we cannot fix the machines that we come to take for granted; we forget the majesty of the first makers; we inherit tools we can use but rarely understand.

In the hyper-modern age, it is sometimes a challenge to remember the human hands behind every technological artifact, and to remember the distinctly human character of production itself. As G. K. Chesterton elegantly put it in his 1935 book The Well and the Shallows:

The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing something very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple. He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade. But he is also doing something which was implicit in all the most ancient religions of the earth; in those great panoramas of pageantry and ritual that followed the order of the seasons in China or Babylonia; he is worshipping the fruitfulness of the world.

An orchard shares something very basic with a computer: it is a technological artifact. It is the produce of human creativity engaging the natural world. An animal will never make an orchard, even if it will make a nest. But men make things which fill no immediate need—save their own need to master and shape the materials of the earth. “And God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” The biblical tradition calls men image-bearers, reflecting in some small but real way the singular power of Divine Creativity. It was the Creator who gave us the principle of property and charged us with the duty and privilege of interacting with the created world. This doctrine is what Chesterton refers to when he writes of a “charter” given by God. The original author of the ownership society was also the Author of the universe.

Private property allows each man to engage with the world as an earnest artist, to be a creator in his humble corner of Creation. Even small property is a complete studio for the human spirit: it needs not a whole orchard, but merely a whole garden. To labor over one’s property is to infuse things with humanness; it is to add our memories to the tangible world, like silent hanging trinkets of hopes and struggles shared, fears realized or relieved, lives lived and lives lost. Anyone could have mowed the lawn at the home where I grew up, but my father did—many hundreds of times, and then I did, and then my younger brothers; my mother’s work was in the gardens. Elsewhere a half-dozen friends and family lent their sweat and toil one weekend to the project of turning the driveway into a tolerable basketball court. These examples and innumerable others are what made our home ours; they represent the human character of human enterprise. Property, in this sense, is the opportunity and realization of the human spirit. It checks the swagger of the autocrat like countless small stinging darts. The great champions of liberty across history, as well as their antagonists, knew well the ineffable value of property.

Foolhardy Masonry

Commencing to pull brambles and weeds
in the rocky spanse of a New Hampshire back yard
An ancient, yet half-baked thought obtrudes in the mind
as the granite pokes at ones feet

"Why not make of the rubble a wall, as ancestors did?"
At once to demarcate the property
and celebrate the subjugation of the wilderness
a low slung monument to dominion

Neath each briar stalk and knotted clump of weed
lurks rock of indeterminate size--pebble, stone, boulder...
The Brother will swear he once dug a trench
til realizing he'd struck a primordial ledge

Flat, round, smooth, jagged, mossy, dirt-crusted, muddy
at first they interlock and stack easily enough
the biggest left for later
the flattest quickly laid
At times a rhythym takes
Yank thistle, pry rock, toss aside
the growing pile can't rebuke if ignored

But soon enough they must be moved
hoisted up and wrestled each into its place
the pause for weedwork
paid by a prolonged sentence of stone throwing

The pleasant seeming patrimony
devolves to Corinthian drudgery
as the barricade snakes slowly along
a yardsman's whim too late thought better of

Humbling thought: they farmed this land