Against Rome Augustine had argued that since property originates in the divine act of creation, the ownership and use of property should always be related to a divine and transcendent conception of justice in which God gives to each sufficient to meet their needs. In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas elaborated the implications of this Augustinian view when he founds his account of natural right and property on its derivation from providential relations between creator and creation, and between creatures. In Thomist political thought property involves responsibilities to uphold the common good, as well as rights to individual use, for if it is used in such a way as to deny the sufficiency of others then its original ordering to the individual by providence is undermined. In these circumstances the householder whose children are hungry for want of sustenance acquires a divinely given right to take bread from a person who has excess of bread who loses the right to call such an act theft.14 For Aquinas the act of taking what is needed by he who lacks does not involve a foundational conflict since the individual property owner is not an autonomous rights holder but steward of that which emanates from the providence of God and that remains part of created order, and not just a humanly constructed domain.

From Northcott, Michael S. 2011. Parochial ecology on st briavels common: Rebalancing the local and the universal in anglican ecclesiology and practice. Journal of Anglican Studies Pending Publication: page 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1740355311000167.

See also Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, ‘Natural Law and Perfect Community: Contributions of Christian Platonism to Political Theory’, Modern Theology 14 (1998), pp. 19-46.

‘Parks, street trees, and manicured lawns do very little to establish the connection between us and the land. They teach us nothing of its productivity, nothing of its capacities. Many people who are born, raised, and live out their lives in cities simply do not know where the food they eat comes from or what a living garden is like. Their only connection with the productivity of the land comes from packaged tomatoes on the supermarket shelf. But contact with the land and its growing process is not simply a quaint nicety from the past that we can let go of casually. More likely, it is a basic part of the process of organic security. Deep down, there must be some sense of insecurity in city dwellers who depend entirely upon the supermarkets for their produce.’

From Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977).

In reaction to… discomforts, whites frequently claim to ‘not see difference’. Ignoring race with black people (such as not mentioning slavery or the race of a famous figure) is comparable to ‘that [behavior] exhibited by certain people on encountering someone with a visible physical handicap. They pretend not to notice that the handicap exists and hope, thereby, to minimize discomfort.’ Indeed, as Toni Morrison points out, ‘the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture’. Yet the will to ‘not see’ these differences, Cose insists, is a costly ‘solution’. Aversive reactions eventuate in practices of avoidance and group isolation, providing supports for an obliviousness that is a denied, thus repressed, will-to-disregard. This obliviousness, importantly, can co-exist with belief in equality and (Christian) inclusiveness.

Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church, (OUP, 2007) p. 20. Referencing Ellis Cose, Color-Blind: Seeing beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 189-90.

But nowhere is the destructive influence of the modern home so great as in its remoteness from work. When people do not live where they work, they do not feel the effects of what they do. The people who make wars do not fight them. The people responsible for strip­ mining, c1ear-cutting of forests, and other ruinations do not live where their senses will be offended or their homes or livelihoods or lives immediately threatened by the consequences. The people re­ sponsible for the various depredations of “agribusiness” do not live on farms. They-like many others of less wealth and power-live in ghettos of their own kind in homes full of “conveniences” which signify that all is well. In an automated kitchen, in a gleaming, odorless bathroom, in year-round air-conditioning, in color TV, in an easy chair, the world is redeemed. If what God made can be made by humans into this, then what can be wrong?

The modern home is so destructive, I think, because it is a generali­zation, a product of factory and fashion, an everyplace or a noplace. Modern houses, like airports, are extensions of each other; they do not vary much from one place to another. A person standing in a modern room anywhere might imagine himself anywhere else-much as he could if he shut his eyes. The modern house is not a response to its place, but rather to the affluence and social status of its owner. It is the first means by which the modern mentality imposes itself upon the world. The industrial conquistador, seated in his living room in the evening in front of his TV set, many miles from his work, can easily forget where he is and what he has done. He is everywhere or nowhere. Everything around him, everything on TV, tells him of his success: his comfort is the redemption of the world. His home is the emblem of his status, but it is not the center of his interest or of his consciousness. The history of our time has been to a considerable extent the movement of the center of consciousness away from home.

Once, some farmers, particularly in Europe, lived in their barns­ and so were both at work and at home. Work and rest, work and pleasure, were continuous with each other, often not distinct from each other at all. Once, shopkeepers lived in, above, or behind their shops. Once, many people lived by “cottage industries” -home production. Once, households were producers and processors of food, centers of their own maintenance, adornment, and repair, places of instruction and amusement. People were born in these houses, and lived and worked and died in them. Such houses were not generaliza­ tions. Similar to each other in materials and design as they might have been, they nevertheless looked and felt and smelled different from each other because they were articulations of particular re­sponses to their places and circumstances.

From Berry, Wendell. “Living in the Future: The “Modern” Agricultural Ideal.” In The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986, 52-53.

In modern life we swim deep in a sea of technology, surrounded by artifacts and patterns of our own making. These artifacts and patterns, like water, are often transparent to us. They are everywhere and nowhere to be seen as we fin our way along chasing after whatever is new, stylizing and restylizing our lives. Yet something feels wrong. Leisure leaves us stressed. Time saving leaves us with no time. Freedom amounts to deciding where to plug into the system. Nature is pushed aside. Even our sense of who we are is transformed in relation to this surrounding sea. So we dart anxiously here and there trying one technological fix after another. It has not occurred to us yet that, like fish in polluted water, what may be wrong lies closest to us.

From: Light, Andrew. “Borgmann’s Philosophy of Technology.” In Technology and the Good Life? Written by Eric Higgs and David Strong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, page 19.

In our day, we are unable to envisage comfort except as part of the technical order of things. Comfort for us means bathrooms, easy chairs, foam-rubber mattresses, air conditioning, washing  ma­ chines, and so forth. The chief concern is to avoid effort and pro­ mote rest and physical euphoria. For us, comfort is closely asso­ciated with the material life; it manifests itself in the perfection of personal goods and machines. According to Giedion, the men of the Middle Ages also were concerned with comfort, but for them comfort had an entirely different form and content. It represented a feeling of moral and aesthetic order. Space was the primary ele­ment in comfort. Man sought open spaces, large rooms, the possi­bility of moving about, of seeing beyond his nose, of not con­stantly colliding with other people. These preoccupations are alto­gether foreign to us.

Moreover, comfort consisted of a certain arrangement of space. In the Middle Ages, a room could be completely “finished,” even though it might contain no furniture. Everything depended on pro­ portions, material, form. The goal was not convenience, but rather a certain atmosphere. Comfort was the mark of the man’s personal­ity on the place where he lived. This, at least in part, explains the extreme diversity of architectural interiors in the houses of the period. Nor was this the result of mere whim; it represented an adaptation to character; and when it had been realized, the man of the Middle Ages did not care if his rooms were not well heated or his chairs hard.

From Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 67-68.

The items in a code stand to the moral law as bricks to a building. Wisdom must involve some comprehension of how the bricks are meant to be put together.

This has an immediate bearing on how we read the Bible. Not only is it insufficient to quote and requote the great commands of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it to guide our thought towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint, and not merely to articulate disconnected moral claims. We must look within it not only for moral bricks, but for indications of order in which the bricks belong together. There may be some resistance to this, not only from those who suspect that it may lead to evasions of the ‘plain’ sense of the Bible’s teaching, but from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian construction which will legislate over questions where it would be better to respect the Bible’s silence. But in truth there is no alternative policy if we intend that our moral thinking should be shaped in any significant way by the Scriptures.

Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 200.

In my early days as an aspiring theologian, fresh out of undergraduate studies, I was keenly interested in the idea of social justice. It is hard to deny that we are by nature designed for community, and thus inextricably interconnected. In the light of this reality, the biblical call to do justly cannot be observed passively, i.e. not harming others, but must be seen as an active call. Each act we make (or moment of inaction) and each decision we make has consequences for others and we bear some measure of responsibility for these consequences, even if they are unintended or undesired. I don’t mean to commend a lifestyle of constant hand-wringing or agonising over each act we undertake, as this can lead to a sort of paralysis or worse still apathy. Rather, I believe we are called to pursue a life of communally guided formation and submission which can lead us into increasingly positive choices. Along these lines, the key concern is not: how can I avoid oppressing a textile worker on a distant continent by shopping at the GAP; but rather how can I further the thriving of my neighbour by supporting their work. This sort of thinking does lend itself to localism, as the consequences of our actions are far more transparently evident when dealing more directly with out neighbours, but this is not exclusively the case.

Lately though, under the influence of the “Edinburgh-school” Christian ethicists, Michael Northcott and Oliver O’Donovan I’ve been drawn to a model of justice which is not only practice-oriented, but also one which is sensitive to the span of generations. You can read previous posts I’ve offered along these lines, when I suggested that political conservatives would do well to be attentive to the act of actually conserving something; in a series I did summarising and interacting with Oliver O’Donovan’s common objects of love; and in my reflections on Edmund Burke’s political philosophy. After several years of reflection on ecological ethics from the perspective of Christian theology, I’m convinced that any model for justice that is focused purely on one moment, or even one generation, is fatally flawed. Now that biblical scholars have laid to rest some of the more unhelpful eschatologies of the 20th century, it is time to turn our moral reflection to the future generations that God’s will continue to sustain on this earth either with our help or–with what seems to be our present preoccupation–our hindrance.

It is certainly the case that preparing for the future requires a different sort of moral reflection than our acting in the present moment, but there are plenty of resources there to aid us. This generation’s obsession with engineering-oriented science makes concepts such as the precautionary principle seem inaccessible. In spite of this though, we must begin to open our minds to the possibility that the slowing of technological achievement and economic growth in the present may be what is morally necessary to promote the flourishing of future generations.

This is, as Oliver O’Donovan observes in Common Objects of Love, the meaning of the fifth commandment:

The paradigm command of tradition is, ‘Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which hte Lord your God gives you.’  It appears to our eyes to be concerned with the duties of children, but this is a mistake.  The duties of children are purely responsive to the duty of parents to be to their children what their parents were to them.  This is a command addressed to adults, whose existence in the world is not self-posited but the fruit of an act of cultural transmission, which they have a duty to sustain.  The act of transmission puts us all in the place of receiver and communicator at once.  The household is envisaged as the primary unit of cultural transmission, the ‘father and the mother’ as representing every existing social practice which it is important to carry on.  Only so can community sustain itself within its environment, ‘the land which the Lord your God gives you.’  No social survival in any land can be imagined without a stable cultural environment across generations.  By tradition society identifies itself from one historical moment to the next, and so continues to act as itself.

H/t: Brad Littlejohn for typing the quote out.