A Timeless Wavelength

Andre Williams – The Monkey Speaks His Mind

Here’s a song by an Alabama bluesman that turns a popular argument against Darwinian evolution on its head and uses it as a starting point for a lesson in the political philosophy of John Locke.  (Sentences like that are the reason I started blogging again.)

One common objection to the scientific doctrine that humans and other primates share a common ancestor is that it somehow reduces humans to the status of “mere” animals.  Of course, there are a number of problems with this argument.  For one, it incorrectly presupposes that, because two things descended from or were caused by a prior thing, they must be identical with that thing, and with each other.  For another, it exhibits the “wishful thinking” fallacy, which holds that just because the implications of a fact-claim are undesirable, it must therefore be false.  These arguments and counter-arguments are all very interesting, but they leave an important question unanswered:  if people are upset at the thought that they might be related to monkeys, how do you think the monkeys feel?

Andre Williams, who grew up in the housing projects of Bessemer, Alabama, moved to Detroit, and went on to write songs for the likes of Stevie Wonder and Ike & Tina, finally tackles this important question.  In “The Monkey Speaks His Mind,” we hear a monkey protesting the theory of evolution on the grounds that it is degrading to monkeys. Line by line, the monkey explodes the myth of human moral superiority:  “No monkey ever deserted his wife/ Starved his babies and ruined her life.”

A subsequent verse addresses the issue of property rights:

And another thing you’ll never see

A monkey build a fence around a coconut tree

And let the coconuts go to waste

Forbidding all other monkeys to come and taste

Now if I put a fence around a coconut tree

Starvation would force you to steal from me

This is as good a summary I’ve found for what Robert Nozick calls the “Lockean Proviso,” the restriction placed by John Locke on his labor theory of property as expounded in the Second Treatise on Government. For Locke, property rights stem from the basic right of self-ownership, which extends to ownership over the fruits of one’s labor.  When people transform previously unowned resources through their labor, the resulting product becomes their property — provided that they leave “enough and as good in common” for others to use.  In the example given by our simian friend, through the building of a fence around a coconut tree one violates Locke’s restriction by not leaving enough of the natural resources available to others.  (I am of course here referring to the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, though the other John Locke might have more direct experience with coconut trees.)

Locke’s basic views on property rights have greatly influenced the modern libertarian movement, though curiously the actual Lockean Proviso seems to have fallen out of favor.  Murray Rothbard had some sort of counter-argument to it which I am at present too lazy to look up.  Rothbard’s own views of property rights would seem to indicate that someone who merely built a fence around a coconut tree would own the fence but not the tree, since his labor was applied only to the fence itself and the land on which it stood.  This is all well and good, except if the fence is there I still can’t get to the tree, whether I have a “right” to it or not.  There’s an interesting debate over whether the claimants to an enclosure have the obligation to provide an easement to any who wish to gain access to the unowned resources that are enclosed.

Then there are those who go in the other direction and wish to keep the Proviso intact, particularly in regards to land.  The followers of Henry George view land as a finite resource over which no one individual has any more natural claim than another.  If an individual decides to appropriate land for his private use, he must compensate the rest of society through the payment of “ground rents,” or a tax on the unimproved land value.  George believed that ground rent was the only truly just form of taxation, since unlike taxes on trade or income it did not punish productivity.  He felt that the land value tax alone was sufficient to fund the necessary functions of government, and thus his followers became known as “Single Taxers.”  (Not to be confused with the “Flat Tax” or “Fair Tax” plans currently advocated by certain talk radio blowhards.)  Today the Georgists form a tiny, eccentric minority within the greater libertarian movement.  They claim that thinkers as diverse as Thomas Paine, Winston Churchill, William F. Buckley, and Mumia Abu-Jamal have advocated the single-tax position, though I question how much of George’s overall political philosophy any one of them might have agreed with.

So there you have it.  Three hundred years of John Locke’s political legacy summed up in a blues song about a monkey.  Maybe that makes up for his rival Thomas Hobbes getting to have a cartoon tiger named after him.