John Locke: Immortalizing Money and Turning Divine Right into Property Rights

             John Locke and Newton were friends. their friendship, though certainly they wouldn't have thought of it this way,  seems to presage in its affinities, what would later become the seamless and symbiotic alliance of capitalism, empire and science. The basic pattern of racist Imperialism was already well developed by Shakespeare's time, and even better developed by the time of Locke and Newton.

            One could speculate that the Lockean vision, from later in the 17th century, of the world and of man's mind as a "tabula rasa", or empty slate, is a perfect image to justify the both the exploitation of nature and of non-European peoples. Nature or the Other in the Lockean theory of knowledge,  becomes merely a passive receptacle, a "tabula rasa", which the European must act upon, mold, alter, or remake in his own image, as if he were a god. The idea of the Tabula Rasa closely resembles the ideology of the Pen and the Tablet found in the Koran, which, in Islamic history has justified similar Imperial conquests and invasions.

            Locke's philosophy, which he wrote down as a formal epistemology, becomes a theory of knowledge that dictates a practice of power in the world. Locke's philosophy will later justify both empirical science and the rule of a propertied oligopoly, as the Merchant Warriors of the 17th century become the corporate warriors of the 20th.

            The explicit tie, quoted earlier, that Innocent III makes between the right of the crusaders to steal the wealth of their victims and their metaphysical salvation is little different than John Locke's claim that the English have the right to steal the land of Native Americans, since Indians are not making use of the land, in Locke's estimation. In imitation of the Bible, Locke writes his own creation or foundation myth, to justify the sacrality, and virtually, the 'divine right' of private property: "Thus labor, in the beginning, gave the right of property... [and] in the beginning all the world was America", Locke writes. The divine right of property must be imposed on America which had done without it for 30,000 years, at least. Salvation is ownership, and the Master who owns, owns by virtue of his Christian right. "And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling" Locke adds. Money, like the Eucharistic species, brings a resemblance of immortality.  It is not money primarily that interested Locke, though he was enormously motivated to make more of it, as many of his letters show. Rather, his concern seems to have been the immortality, or, what amounts to the same thing, the power that wealth gave him. Like Jay Gould, the American Robber Baron, Locke's primary concern was erect himself into a position of highest status and influence.  Gould said his purpose was not money but "more to show I could make a combination"- that is a Trust or a monopoly. In other words, he wanted power and greater status than the other tycoons, like Carnegie and Rockefeller, that he competed with.[1] Money was a new god to which men like Locke or Carnegie could attach their egos, the need of power and their intelligence.

            The process of gaining immortality, or money, fame or power, " a lasting thing that men could keep without spoiling" is important to this discussion and this book in general. What is involved here is the creation of a system of abstract goods. Locke is in pursuit of abstract Money and Land, but Truth and God are equally possible abstractions whose ultimate value, to those who desire them, seems to confer a species of immortality. In practice these abstractions or gods are interchangeable, or can occur in many combinations. Nevertheless, the benefits conferred of wealth, power, fame, history centrality or an illusion of perfection are always conferred upon a very few, the Cardinals, Popes, Kings, Executives, Party Bosses, CEO's, Financiers, Fuhers, Conquistadores, Doctors. Scientists, Geniuses, Lawyers, Insurance Men or Presidents. But in general such abstractions have a destructive side that effects many and a constructive side that benefit few. In the 17th century, the search for immortalizing knowledge, wealth and power created atrocities, and some of the worst the world has ever seen. The role of abstract entities like 'God', 'Money' and "Land' in these atrocities is central.

            One author observes regarding the growth of the abstract ideas of capital, land and wealth that: 

The Middle ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation- indeed the whole world until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries- could not envisage the market system for the thoroughly sound reason that Land, Labor and Capital- the basic ingredients of production which the market system allocates- did not yet exist.  Land, Labor and Capital in the sense of soil, human beings and tools are of course coexistent with society itself. But the idea of abstract labor did not immediately suggest itself to the human mind any more than the idea of abstract energy or matter. Land, labor and capital as 'agents' of production, as impersonal, dehumanized economic entities, are as much modern conceptions as the calculus [of Descartes and Newton].[2]           

            The "impersonal, dehumanized, economic entities" eventually created corporate and national entities which devoured men like the gods of ancient Greece, and "killed them for their sport'. The land is carved up into squares to maximize profit, "settled" or 'allotted", and the Indians who worked with the land to sustain and participate in life rather than exploit it, had to be eliminated, or 'terminated' in the lexicon of US government treaties. The corporation, "Science" "Money' and 'History' all ceased to be involved in the concern with the humanity of the "I" or a "We" and become an impersonal "It" , in Einstein's phrase. The "it", money, god or history must increase at any cost, must profit and progress, gain land, converts, wealth or fame, regardless of who is killed or who falls in despair, hunger or fear along the way. The abstractions of Land, Labor and Capital are put before people and their rights and people die, starve, suffer coercion and injustice as a result high minded ideals of Landowners, Landlords, Plantation Masters, the controllers of labor, the Robber Barons and new aristocrats of Capital.  John Ellis, whatever his motives may have been, was quite right when he told the Catawba Indians in 1749 that the colonists "had no right to the land by them possessed and that even his Majesty [the King of England], had no right to those lands".[3] The discovery of America was a delusion. It was already populated, and the claim to the land could only be achieved by mass murder, and later, by perpetuating the ideology of  'progress' and the 'wilderness'.

            America is what Locke calls the "common lands", which must be "enclosed" to become fruitful, just as the lands had to be enclosed for the Masters benefit in England and Ireland, throwing the peasants off their land for sheep to graze for profit in wool. [4] While once men ate sheep, now 'Sheep eat men', Thomas More said somewhere of the enclosure movement. Locke, like Jefferson after him, saw the land as unmaximized for profit and power by the Natives, and thus "wasted." He considered it the duty and calling of "free" men to exploit the opportunity of America. John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony wrote in the 1630's that the Puritans had the right to steal the Native American lands because "that which lies common ...is free to any to possess and improve it. For God hath given... the right to the earth".[5]   Since the Indians have not "improved" the land, in Winthrop's estimation, as in Locke's, Christians have the right to dominate it and kill off the Indians. Winthrop and Locke were both wrong on this matter. The Indians had 'improved' the land, but not in the European sense, which really meant capitalizing and exploiting the land.  The Indians were themselves the lands proof of improvement, for they sustained the land, without exploiting and destroying it, a feat the Europeans and Americans still cannot accomplish, for all their technological bravado.

            "The Lord God of our Fathers hath given us for a rightful Possession" the land of "the Heathen People": it was the "providence of God that lay the fear of the English and the dread of them upon all the Indians. the terror of God was upon them round about", wrote Reverend Increase Mather, in New England in 1676, justifying the massacre of the Peqots.  The Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and many others suffered terrible atrocities at the hands of the invading Europeans. The "terror of God" killed them.  God here, of course, symbolizes the will to power and knowledge of the Puritans and Europeans. [6]  One recent historian writes that "the coming of European civilization to the new world was a spiritual story", echoing the mythic views of Winthrop and Mather. He claims it is a story of "a civilization that had substituted history for myth as a way of understanding life" and it was this "substitution that enabled Europeans explore the most remote places of the globe, to colonize them, and to impose their values on the native populations". [7] This is merely a recent restatement of the basic ideology of western and American Manifest Destiny. "History" indeed, is partly to blame, as is the terror of the god idea used by those that felt justified in murdering populations that had not harmed them.  In a certain way the very idea of 'historical consciousness" is a Christian creation.

            History in this sense is the result, as one author puts it, of "the unique and unrepeatable event of Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man, in whom the eternal God lifted up history into his own life and fully entered historical time in order to redeem it".[8]  In this case the conquest is the story of the brutalization of the "fleshy" world of matter by the historical fatality of the Christian Transcendentalist 'spirit'. In this case it is Christ and his 'father' who are to blame for the murder of the Native Americans and the brutality of slavery.  Just as Christ, the abstract hero, must 'overcome" the world to reign supreme over it, the colonists must 'tame the land' or destroy the wilderness, and the Indians who live in it, to 'redeem' it. But of course these symbols of Christ and Wilderness and Abstract Capital are merely sublimation's of the will to power through knowledge of the Europeans. They are justifying mechanisms in the apparatus of conquest and power.

             The Europeans had no right to the land, of course: this was merely a rationalization for human and environmental rape and murder. They still don't.  But to question the ideology of the right of Euro-Americans to hegemony over the hemisphere requires questioning the roots of this false illusion.  As Vine Deloria, a Native American writer has observed, Americans cling to the "traditional idea that they suddenly came upon a vacant land on which they created the world's most affluent society. Not only is such an idea false, it is absurd".  But to recognize this means to  question not only capitalism, but, as Deloria notes, "Christian religion and the Western idea of history", which would include Marxism, presumably. With these false justifications exposed,  both "western man and his religion stand naked before the world".[9] Covering up the absurdity of a few Europeans coming to America, planting a flag in a beach and declaring the area from the Atlantic to the Pacific belongs to the King takes serious work.  Much of American history and culture is involved directly or indirectly with keeping up the illusion of manifest destiny, American righteousness and the American Dream intact. It is not an easy job to accomplish and much training is needed in the Universities to sustain the illusion.

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