Month: June 2022

Walking composition

“I want a god
as my accomplice . . .

a god
who longs
from jail
for a change
in the order
of things”
—from “Prayer/Oracion,” Francisco X. Alarcón

I don’t think I have ever been so behind in everything I am obligated to do except for the six months to a year after I had a premature baby with delicate health who spent his first month of life in neonatal intensive care. That was such a long time ago I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be so utterly overwhelmed. I keep wanting to write about the garden, and compost and soil, and how the friend who’s helping us transform it from a haven for thistles and knapweed into a place where food grows said that everyone around here has clay soil (true) but you could actually throw pots with ours. I haven’t purely because I’ve been so busy that the ideas just pile up in my head like the walking photos in my phone and the unread magazines in my email inbox.

I am reminded that when my son was born, my doctor had to choose between an emergency C-section for me or one for the young woman who’d come into the emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy because we were both dying and she had to decide which one of us had long enough to make it to different hospital. I’ve always wondered if that woman got the surgery she needed in time.*

Speaking of babies . . . actually, let’s not. There is nothing I can add that hasn’t already been said by someone else, and it’s up to those who actually have power to use it.

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A month or so ago I shared a section from No Trespassing, my book on ownership that I will be writing and publishing here on this newsletter over the next couple years. That excerpt was from the summary of the chapter on ownership of people, a subject that I wrote about a bit more expansively in the Overview section. I’ll be sharing the full Overview next month as I prepare to move this newsletter to a paid version,** but it seems like the right time to share a larger snippet:

“Does being human require ownership over oneself—over freedom of movement, of thought, of affection? Or is it innate to us—is humanity a construct or an immobile fact? Philosophers have been debating questions like these for hundreds of years and will still be doing so hundreds of years from now. I doubt anyone reading this lets that debate detract from their own feelings of being human. At least, I hope not.

For slavery to function and to last it has to make people non-human and therefore own-able. When you are in a position of being owned, a feeling of humanity might be hard to retain, and the problem isn’t limited to our common conception of slavery. For women, this is an ongoing struggle reimagined in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale and its more recent adaptation for television: in Gilead, the post-America country she imagined, women and the babies they bear are once again property, as they have been many times throughout human history.

The power of reproduction has been central to the discussion of women’s bodies as property for as long as civilization has existed. The right to privacy underpinning the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade is contained within a woman’s own body: I, as a woman, have a right to choose what happens within the confines of my own skin, and personally, as the mother of a daughter who will someday be a grown woman, I’ll fight tooth and nail to ensure she has the same right of choice. And I’ll have to fight tooth and nail because there will always be those who seek to remove that right. That question may shift dramatically in the future, though, as medical science is able to keep babies alive ever-earlier in their fetal development.”

(I started writing this proposal in the summer of 2019, and it was turned down by the final publisher my agent submitted it to in January 2021, so these lines aren’t a direct response to current events, just to what anyone could see was coming.)

Those medical advancements are already happening—my 32-week preemie baby shared a NICU with babies as little as 22 weeks and that was 15 years ago—so the question of a woman’s ownership and sovereignty over her own body will actually become more important, as well as transforming focus.

Reading the Supreme Court’s opinion yesterday declaring that the U.S. grants no right to abortion, I was taken with the intensive focus on the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and what seems like pretty forthright language bringing the entire concept of individual liberty up for future debate:

“The underlying theory on which Casey [Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court case that reaffirmed the right to an abortion] rested—that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for ‘liberty’—has long been controversial.”

I have no idea whether substantive protection for liberty has long been controversial in legal circles or not, but the focus on it seems understated in conversations about this decision, especially when taken with repeated references to the (absurd) idea that Americans have no rights that weren’t originally enumerated in the original Constitution (as a reminder, when it was written not only was slavery legal but the only people with a right to vote were white landowning men over the age of 21) as well as language given in the next paragraph, that

“In interpreting what is meant by ‘liberty,’ the Court must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what the Fourteenth Amendment protects with the Court’s own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. For this reason, the Court has been ‘reluctant’ to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution.”

What is meant by “liberty”? This is a conversation every single one of our human societies needs to have, and fast.

One of the questions that keeps me writing about ownership, private property, and the commons is the question of ownership over oneself—what it means, what its parameters are, and why, frankly, it doesn’t seem to exist. Rights, the Supreme Court opinion made clear, apply to property and those who hold it. “‘Cases involving property and contract rights’” have “concrete reliance interests,” whereas cases involving women’s control of our own bodies don’t. And there’s no reason to think that throwing the question of liberty out into a society with massive built-in injustices and power imbalances won’t have much broader implications for everyone.

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Does being human require ownership over oneself? It’s a question that would seem to live in philosophy forever, but as I write about in my book proposal, laws are born from the stories we tell one another about how to live together. Laws are stories. Who is considered human is one of those stories that has very real, concrete effects on real people, and those stories change across time.

I recently read Arkady Martine’s science fiction book A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, and among its other excellent qualities is forthright grappling with this question of who is considered human. Citizens of the empire Teixcalaan are, but that same empire—modeled I think on the Roman Empire—gets to define who else is considered a person, a human, because Teixcalaan is in control of the galactic story. The Murderbot Diaries similarly have a constant posing of the question “Who is a person?” because in corporate-controlled space, organic-computer constructs like SecUnit are not. The same question came up for Data in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man.” And in Lois McMaster Bujold’s 1988 book Falling Free, the “quaddies” genetically engineered to serve a galactic corporation are considered property, not people.

Science fiction in general has a talent for making the implications of philosophical questions-turned-laws real and visceral, one of its many strengths when done well.

But you don’t have to be into science fiction to start facing these questions and interrogating accepted narratives. The consequences of values-turned-stories-turned-laws are everywhere—including, in many iterations, contained within our own bodies.

Bonus photo: I’ve been wanting to share this, cross-stitches done by two of my closest and extremely talented friends who know how deeply my family feels the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sometimes your feelings need to get a little stabby. Thank you guys 🧡

*I came down with a very rare pregnancy condition called HELLP Syndrome, for which the only treatment is delivery. I wrote about it for BuzzFeed several years ago, and another essay for Full Grown People about the time in the NICU, still the most terrifying month of my life.

**There are many new subscribers here—welcome to all of you! And if it’s not your thing, no hard feelings. I mean that truly. This post from January describes a bit more of the book project I’ll be doing when this newsletter shifts to a paid version. “Who Owns the Earth?” an essay published with Aeon in 2016, gives a good overview of the private property vs. the commons question the book project was born from. This first On the Commons post explains more about this newsletter.

For everyone: After a bunch of research and asking helpful others, here are the rates I’ve decided on for the newsletter: $6/month discounted to $60/year for an annual subscription and a $100/year “founding member” option. Walking compositions and book chapters will be subscriber-only, with other regular essays open to everyone. REMEMBER: If you want to read but can’t pay, when the time comes email me with the code word “tribble” and I’ll enable a subscription, no explanation needed. Hopefully I can offer that forever.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• It’s been frustrating how little English-language news there is about Ukraine and Russia. I know this is our reality and media ecosystem and it always happens but still. I did appreciate historian (and author of On Tyranny) Timothy Snyder’s short essay about the misguided thinking that Putin needs compromise and an “off-ramp.”

• In my recent series on community, I wrote about the importance of trust in Part 3, so appreciated that David Roberts and Chris Hayes highlighted trust in their conversation about politics in America: “Social trust is the coin of the realm without which nothing else is possible—no good media, no good politics, no good policing. And what creates social trust? . . . No one knows. . . . It’s like the mystery juice that makes everything run but no one knows how it works or how to create it or how to stop it from leaching away.” (I don’t usually listen to mainstream podcasts, especially about current events, but this one was worthwhile.)

• Sherri Spelic, a physical education teacher who writes the Edified Listener blog, sent me this Matthew Cheney essay “Difficult Peace,” which I found incredibly well written and painful to read in part because it was hard to disagree with some of his conclusions about guns in America.

• Speaking of Sherri Spelic, I keep going back to her recent post with the text of a keynote presentation she gave on kids and resistance in education: “Elementary PE can bring up really awful things for some folks, I know. I regret that but it is a frighteningly common reality: humiliation, physical injury, significant emotional damage. At the same time, it also illustrates a teaching and learning dynamic characterized by deliberate power imbalances, a frequent focus on competition and ranking, and a potentially widespread dismissal of students who do not conform to a specific athletic norm.”

• Atlas of Conflict Reduction is a fascinating project focused on working with ranchers to coexist with wildlife (like wolves and grizzly bears) that I learned about by chance. The website has an overview of several collaboration stories, and it looks like a book will be coming out next year. It reminded me that I interviewed someone from Blackfoot Challenge—which does similar work—years ago but never managed to get that story placed for publication.

• Montana recently commemorated 50 years of the Montana constitution, which not only guarantees everyone a “clean and healthful environment” but also a right to privacy. For This and Future Generations is a one-hour documentary about the shaping of that constitution in 1972, which came about in large part due to decades of abuse and corruption from the copper mining industry.

• A two-part interview on Talking Headways with professor of organizational studies and sociology Jeremy Levine got into a very nuts-and-bolts policy-wonky but crucial conversation about what community means and who gets to define it. Part 2 in particular delved into what a slippery concept “community” can be and how important it is to know what—and who—you’re talking about.

• Thanks to Lee for sending me “Promised Lands,” an article in Seven Days magazine about landowners in Vermont who open their land to the public hiking. (That is an Issu link, and if you haven’t used Issu before, be patient. It’s a visually appealing but difficult to navigate platform for magazines.)

• Max Haiven was on Last Born in the Wilderness talking about his book Palm Oil: palm oil, colonialism, and the kinds of human sacrifice required to create, enable, and maintain empire.

• I thought the “Home and Away” episode of Pondercast was going to be about becoming a refugee, but it was about radical responses to scarce affordable housing. AND Laurie Brown does a fantastic job of summarizing Henry George’s case for a land value tax and how his book Progress & Poverty informed the original Monopoly game, originally called Landlord’s Game and designed to demonstrate the benefits of socialism. Brown explained a vital Georgist point I keep forgetting to mention, which is that property increases in value in large part not due to actions of its “owners” but due to work and investment by the surrounding community. (Economist Kate Raworth wrote a short essay on Aeon explaining the history of the Monopoly game.)

• “Character Count” was also a fun Pondercast—I cannot remember my high school locker combination, but do have a weird superpower of instantly memorizing the number of every hotel room I’ve ever checked into!

Wandering composition

“The idea of individual, exclusive ownership, not just of what can be carried or occupied, but of the immovable, near-eternal earth, has proved to be the most destructive and creative cultural force in written history.” —Owning the Earth, Andro Linklater

I have a few hundred pages of a fifth-grade reading textbook teacher’s manual left to copy edit, and am trying to get my head around the future of this newsletter post-June. Thank you all for sticking through these ramblings, and providing your own ideas in return!

As I wrote in January, after I finish my current copy editing contract, I’ll be working on a paid version* of On the Commons. The focus will continue to be many of the things I already write about, but as promised I’ll be publishing the chapters from the book I’m writing. To kick off a process that will likely take a couple of years if not more, here are the title and subtitle:

Before shifting to a paid version, I’ll share some excerpts from the Overview section of the original book proposal, but to begin with want to share an even briefer overview known as the “Note on Structure” section (the one part of nonfiction book proposals I always have a hard time getting my head around, aside from the marketing section, which is always hard), lifted from that same proposal. While the proposal itself is over 60 pages and includes an individual summary of each chapter, this section is a briefer version that I hope gives a good overall idea of what I’m working on:

NOTE ON STRUCTURE

“Medieval illustration of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks, on a calendar page for August. Queen Mary’s Psalter (Ms. Royal 2. B. VII) fol. 78v[1].”

           

No Trespassing will have an introduction followed by nine chapters looking at different aspects of humanity’s relationship with ownership.

The first section, chapters 1–4, is focused on the forms of ownership that people are most familiar with: land, water, food, and possessions. Chapters 5–6 are about ownership of people, including forms of slavery and a sense of ownership over ourselves. Chapters 7–9, the final section, take the ideas previously presented and look at their applications for our collective futures: what will happen with resources and property boundaries when humans begin to colonize space, how the weight of a growing population will force changes in how we allow or restrict rights of use, and what ownership of information means for creation of a shared human story and understanding going forward.

            The first section details our past and current ownership of land, water, food, and, to put it crudely, stuff. The Introduction presents some of my personal interest in this subject, my love for the Montana landscape along with my own journey to seeing how “land” became “property” over many centuries. Chapter 1 uses my personal struggle with my ancestors’ role in colonizing land that was originally the homeland of several Native nations to introduce the Homestead Act, the Doctrine of Discovery, and Manifest Destiny—ideas created by the powerful in order to take the lands of Indigenous people worldwide. Chapter 2 focuses on ownership of water—questioning how and why corporations have the right to pollute a resource that is necessary for life; and Chapter 3 on what the future of another resource (seeds and food) will be in the face of patented, privately owned, often genetically modified, organisms. Chapter 4 is about hoarding and its role in both income inequality and the sense of scarcity that drives a desire for possession.

            The second section focuses on what ownership means for being human. Chapter 5 is about ownership of people told through a history of serfdom in Russia, modern slavery worldwide, and the ongoing struggle for women’s rights. Chapter 6 is about the future of the data commons. As the parody below shows, many people in the tech world liken data-driven capitalism to medieval feudalism, in which users are the serfs beholden to tech companies playing the role of feudal landholders.

Parody of Queen Mary’s Psalter, one of several found online at sites discussing data harvesting as the new feudalism.

           Section three looks toward the future. Chapter 7 lays out the real-world examples of commons-based systems of ownership that could provide models for the future, and brings to a popular audience the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who specialized in studying the commons. Chapter 8 sends us out into space, covering what we’ve already done in terms of exploration and the possibilities of mining, the Outer Space Treaty, and what our science fiction visions of space colonization might look like in practice. Chapter 9 brings the narrative back to the larger human story and where each of us fits into it, and on this planet, in the context of ownership.

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I have a backlog of “stuff to read and listen to” to share, but thought I’d leave it at this for now, which seems like enough to read! One of the questions I’m still unsure of is how to publish the chapters. The three-part series on “community” I did recently added up to about 10,000 words, which is what my chapters run (though they should be far more polished than that was!), and it seems like a lot of drop on people all at once. I’d like to make sure that the content remains something to look forward to and have time to discuss, rather than yet another thing added on stressful to-do lists.

Walking compositions and longer essays (which average around 3000 words) will remain the same length.

*I’m digging into Substack’s advice columns and looking at the newsletters I pay for (and asking advice!) to figure out pricing structures. Will share that info on my next post.

Essay

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word but recently. The weight it carries, and the depth of what it erases. “I’m sorry I lost my temper with you, but I’ve had a long day” is a very different sentence from “I’m sorry I lost my temper with you; I’ve had a long day.” The but deflects. It absolves the speaker of responsibility, instead turning it back on the person being spoken to. While “I’ve had a long day but that’s no excuse for losing my temper with you” gives an opening to reframe and repair.

I use but in my writing all the time. It’s partly just my style, which is shaped (probably wildly out of proportion) by the few years I spent as a Lincoln-Douglas debater in high school. LD debate requires the competitors to prepare for every angle of argument on a subject because you never know in any given tournament which position you’re going to be arguing. Not only does your side change throughout the day, but you might be competing against someone who’s come up with an argument you never heard of. I once debated a guy whose entire case was built around the philosophy of hedonism. I don’t remember the topic, but after winning that round I sought him out to tell him how hard he made me work for it. His approach was novel; it wasn’t in my files of but or and or yet arguments, much less in the bank of quotes from philsophers I’d built up.

In writing, I find, but helps me poke at ideas from as many angles as I can think of. It’s a turnabout, a wondering, an opportunity to essay in an essay. And it serves for so many other words, like instead or please. Like the Lord’s Prayer: And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.

In can also, though, cover up sloppy thinking or weak arguments. It can forgive sins and gloss over realities we are trying to ignore.

It’s a word that I’ve heard over and over in discourse about American history, used as a way to relieve the speaker of responsibility for considering the genocidal violence of how this country was founded. Most specifically—since this is the culture I come from and the world I live in, the American West and the pioneer/homesteader-colonizers who were ancestors to many of us, including me—it allows people the safety of claiming pride in their heritage while absolving them of the responsibility of asking how that heritage was obtained. “Yes, the way that my family ended up with this land was the result of genocide and theft, but we’ve been taking good care of it for three or four or five generations; we’re part of this land’s history, too, now.”

Statements like this hint at well-intentioned acknowledgement, yet the but is what hides the rest, the deeper understanding, the willingness to grapple with what that genocide and theft meant for the people on the receiving end of it versus those who received its benefits, much less the willingness to face the fact that the descendants of those who were massacred and stolen from are also still here having to live with that history without any escape through but.

It’s something that hit me harder than usual when I was elk hunting last fall in Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills. The rancher (whom I never met) owns something like 30,000 acres—all of it landlocking actual public land—and his written ranch history gives a brief couple of sentences about how the Sweetgrass Hills were (not are, even though the Blackfeet reservation is practically next door) sacred to the Blackfeet Nation. The rancher’s history could, and did, start with his family’s original possession of the land, the taking, the claiming of private ownership. Not, for example, with the 1870 Baker Massacre in which 177 Blackfeet people, including 50 children, were murdered, followed by decades of intentional starvation strategies like the killing of millions of bison by the U.S. government.

The word but makes it easy to pass on only the chosen narratives of those in power.

I don’t personally see how anyone can look that history in the face, really look at it, and still be willing to glide over how one’s family came to be in the possession of land that was taken from others, not that long ago and via unimaginable violence. The immediate violence of genocide like the Baker and Sand Creek Massacres, and the slower violence of treaty violations, forced removals, and outright lies. It was future president James Garfield, remember, who forged Chief Charlo’s signature on a removal agreement in 1872, which was then used to pressure and eventually force the Salish people to relocate from the Bitteroot Valley to the Flathead, where the land they were promised would be theirs in perpetuity was again stolen for railways, timber companies, and forced allotment sales to more white settlers.

The issue seems to be that people looking at this history don’t know how to deal with the feelings evoked by its reality. “I didn’t do it,” is the common response. Didn’t buy or sell enslaved people or steal people’s land. No, you didn’t. Neither did I. Neither did my homesteader ancestors, not directly. That does not mean, however, that we have in any way earned that but; we’re using it to try to pretend that that history doesn’t matter anymore. Things are the way they are and there’s not much we can do about it. You hear this all the time when the subject of “land back” is brought up. Even when some are sympathetic, the feeling is that the land is already redistributed in a different form and to different people. It’s already owned, even public land. There’s no going back.

Henry George had an immense amount to say about the tension of this injustice in his 1879 book Progress & Poverty, calling ownership by wealthy landowners (land hoarders, really), especially among the English aristocracy, “theft from the future.”

“This robbery is not like the robbery of a horse or a sum of money, that ceases with the act. It is a fresh and continuous robbery, that goes on every day and every hour. It is not from the produce of the past that rent is drawn; it is from the produce of the present. . . . Why should we hesitate about making short work of such a system?”

The phrase “private property is bedrock” comes up a great deal in conversations I listen to about public lands, conservation, and American history. But (BUT!) if I let the realities of American history lead me further into the past than the founding myths of the country and back across the Atlantic Ocean, what I find is that this “bedrock,” too, was built out of injustices and theft of land, of the enclosed commons that provide humans with life. One of the reasons that the Scots-Irish (a people who are always trotted out as some kind of epitome of American ideals, particularly when it comes to land ownership; I am one of their descendants, along with millions of others) were so fiercely defensive about land ownership is that those same Scots-Irish spent centuries being repressed and refused land-based self-sufficiency, much less ownership, by the English after their land was stolen and their commons-based systems of management shattered.

“The ‘sacredness of property,’” wrote George,

“has been preached so constantly and effectively, especially by those ‘conservators of ancient barbarism,’ as Voltaire styled the lawyers, that most people look upon the private ownership of land as the very foundation of civilization, and if the resumption of land as common property is suggested, think of it at first blush as a chimerical vagary, which never has and never can be realized, or as a proposition to overturn society from its base and bring about a reversion to barbarism.

“If it were true that land had always been treated as private property, that would not prove the justice or necessity of continuing so to treat it, any more than the universal existence of slavery, which might once have been safely affirmed, would prove the justice or necessity of making property of human flesh and blood. . . .

“But while, were it true, that land had always and everywhere been treated as private property would not prove that it should always be so treated, this is not true. On the contrary, the common right to land has everywhere been primarily recognized, and private ownership has nowhere grown up save as the result of usurpation. The primary and persistent perceptions of mankind are that all have an equal right to land, and the opinion that private property in land is necessary to society is but an offspring of ignorance that cannot look beyond its immediate surroundings—an idea of comparatively modern growth, as artificial and as baseless as that of the right divine of kings.”

Private property is not a bedrock; it’s quicksand. And it’s fiction. It leads too many of us to turn our minds away from the injustices of history. It’s a comfortable narrative that tricks us into thinking that the current state of things is not only right but inevitable.

This is not to pretend that those of us who are colonizer-descended don’t have a relationship with the land. I don’t personally own the land that was given to my homesteader ancestors—a second cousin does, and his son will inherit—nor the land that forms the nearby ranch my mother grew up on. I still feel a connection to both of those spreads in eastern Montana, a love, a kinship. And it’s here where I stumble into opposition to but: I want that feeling of kinship to lead all of us who feel it into even the smallest comprehension of how it compares with the kinship of people who lived with that land for tens of thousands of years and who within a century or so were forced off of it so it could be given to people like my ancestors.

(This is aside from the other side of the story, which has to do with the Homestead Act being a land-speculation pyramid scheme that most benefited railway and timber interests that could game the system.)

Too often, that sense of kinship stops at the borders of one’s own personal history. The acknowledgment ends at the fact: “. . . but my family has been good stewards of this land for five generations,” the but providing cover, erasure, to avoid facing what that reality has meant for others.

With even the very few books I’ve read laying this history open, like Nick Estes’s Our History Is the Future and Blake Watson’s Buying America from the Indians and Mark Charles’s Unsettling Truths, the number of massacres, deceptions, and treaty violations described lead to overwhelming emotional upheaval. I keep thinking about it as if one’s children were taken away. As I have children, and pay more attention to the news than I want to, this is fear I feel in my gut all the time. It’s chilling and visceral and it both has happened—residential schools being just one example, and I think it’s important to remember that, in many of those cases, Indigenous children were taken away to abusive boarding schools in order to force some tribal nations to open their reservations up to white settlement—and is happening. One need only glance at the news out of Ukraine to see history repeating itself. It wouldn’t matter if someone came back in 50 years, or 150, and said, “But we took really good care of them.” That but would not, does not, matter. It wouldn’t for the theft of children and it doesn’t for land.

This history existed, and it seems to be an enormous task for settler-descended Americans to learn about it without feeling like acknowledgment harms them (us) personally in some way. Even the most well-intentioned leap too quickly to the but to avoid looking more deeply into how we got here. Too many of us seem to lack even a modicum of courage, much less a willingess to let the people who have been most harmed lead the conversation and set expectations for future relationships. Fear—of what I’m not sure, but my guess is that it has to do with fear of losing what you have—leads us to the but and away from the harder conversations.

I have a photo above my desk of my homesteader ancestors—them on one side and my Russian grandparents on the other. I carry pride in both of those family branches. Understanding how that tall, clear-eyed Danish-German brood ended up with thousands of acres in eastern Montana doesn’t threaten them (they’re dead), and it certainly doesn’t threaten me or my children.

And if someone like Ninian Stuart, owner and laird—now steward of a land trust, instead, by his own choice—of a Scottish estate used for centuries as a royal summer escape, can question the roots of his own ownership, and seek to change it, so can we all. “How can you own a hill?” Stuart mused in an interview with Scotland Outdoors. “Actually, I belong to that hill, really, far more than that hill, or this forest, could ever belong to a person. We belong to this.”

“Land owning has come with power and privilege, and from money, past or present. In terms of Falkland Estate, if we look up there, there is the Temple of Decision, which was built in 1850 by Margaret Onesipherus Bruce, who built this house. Their money came from her uncle from the East India Company. . . . In terms of my family, the Second Marquess of Bute mortgaged all of his estates and created Cardiff Docks. And Cardiff Docks became the biggest coal exporting port in the world. . . . Onesipherus Tyndall came from a slaveowning family, a slave-trading family, in Bristol. When you go back, there are these past truamas and challenges which is probably associated with anywhere. There is something around acknowledging that. . . . If we’re going to become a fair society and to tap into the skills that people have, then that needs to change. . . .

“There’s something of moving from the family tree to a more resilient forest of community.”

“The biggest challenge,” he said, “is the revolution of ownership,” and that’s without even having mentioned the injustices inflicted on Scottish people themselves, for centuries up to and beyond the Highland Clearances that landed so many in North America.

Because that’s another thing about but: By using it to shut out the past, we also get to ignore the realities that drove people out of Europe in the first place. We risk repeating the history that absolutist land ownership and land-hoarding led life there to be so impossible for so many. Beyond risk—we’re already in the midst of its beginnings.

Henry George didn’t write Progress & Poverty in response to modern truth and reconciliation commissions or to address how we teach history in U.S. schools. He wrote it at a time when the Irish Potato Famine was very recent history, within a hundred years of the American Revolution and Adam Smith’s treatise on free markets, and when voting rights in Britain still had requirements of property ownership (as well as still being limited to men). He wrote it at a time when he could see the effects of land ownership and its relationship to power, how it devalued labor and forced vast numbers of ordinary people into subservience. How absolutely and absurdly unjust it was, and is, to take the very means of life and lock it up in the ownership of a few.

Instead of using but to erase history or deflect responsibility, we could use it as an opening, or a different kind of ownership—to say yes, this history is part of me and how I got there, too. To welcome the hard conversations and even the different values they might force us to consider. I don’t know how to solve the problems the saturate our lives; all I know is that we can’t get anywhere by pretending they have no foundation.