Theoria

Since moving in to a house that I neither own outright, but neither do I rent it, I’ve found myself becoming moderately petty bourgeoisie-fied and liberalized. (Both, obviously, bad things.) Right now in Lanark County, the Maple Syrup Capital of Ontario, the maple trees (quite predictably; all other trees as well) are turning — red, gold, yellow, whatever. It’s a good tourist attraction. People like to look at trees, drive through a quaint small town that still looks like it is somewhere between 1840 and 1910 (cars, trucks, electricity notwithstanding), get a desert and buy a tourist-y trinket from the local artisan shop.

It’s different for people who live on tree lined streets, such as mine. The two houses north of me, as with my house, my neighbour to the south, and the next two houses after that all have large maples on their front lawns. (My neighbour to the north also has an ancient maple — possibly one of the tallest in town — in the southwest corner of his backyard.) The wind, lately, has been blowing down the street and, along with passing traffic, the drift of leaves has largely been from north to south in a cummulative way: I have leaves from the maples of the houses north of me.

I know they aren’t my leaves because my tree (as my neighbour to the south) has not turned yet. The only leaves that aren’t green are brown, because they are on dead branches. (Maples lose a lot of branches in storms.) Very few leaves have fallen from my tree. On Saturday I raked my lawn. I didn’t rake any of my leaves. I raked someone else’s leaves that were on my lawn.

This, in a sense, is a core problem of liberal property regimes and the correlative security that goes along with that: everyone is free to have trees on their lawn, but when the trees turn and leaves fall, they are not responsible for the leaves. Indeed, unless there are bylaws stipulating that leaves must be cleaned up, the tree-owner is under no obligation to clean up their leaves. The result is that everyone has to deal with the freedom of one person, which is secured by their property rights.

They are only responsible insofar as their property extends. (This is why cars are such a big problem — and it isn’t the fuel. In a sense, when the NRA wants to introduce legislation in Florida that will make cars an extension of the household, they are only putting into words what is already there. Their point, however, isn’t consistenty in liberal property law, but rather to allow gun-owners to keep guns in their cars — they’re already allowed to keep them in their home and, if the car is an extension of the home, then they should be allowed to keep them there too. The big problem for the NRA is that employers have the right to refuse guns on their property: the issue turns on the relation between the parking lot and the car. Comparable, no doubt, to condominium law.) Anyway, digression.

While raking leaves on Saturday, I found myself to be quite pissed off. I looked at my neighbours’ lawn and it was covered a foot deep in leaves. They were everywhere: up the driveway, on the porch, on the lawn, on the sidewalk, and on the road. Ankle deep throughout. They were the source of my problem. I began to rake and, with every gust of wind, my lawn was recovered with leaves. Their leaves on my lawn.

Soon enough, the daughter came out armed with tight jeans, an inappropriate shirt, a telephone and a rake. She pretended to rake as she talked on the phone. I finished raking and bagging well before she did. I broke a sweat and got a huge blister — that subsequently opened and is still open — while doing this. She pushed leaves around.

Befitting our rapidly approaching middle age, we got in the car (Blythe and I, not the girl and I) and went for a drive. We saw a house we liked, online, in Chantry, a small town not far away. This is our middle aged entertainment: we scan mls.ca and oreb.ca for houses we like and then go look at them. We get curd or fries along the way. It’s something to do.

When we got home, it appears that the girl had finished. There was a huge pile of leaves on their lawn, but she didn’t put it in bags. It’s still on their lawn now. And, now, my lawn is covered in leaves again. As John Locke (who, incidentally, invented that small-town passtime: scrapbooking) would have it, I spent the entire day improving my property. At the end of the day after much labor had been used up, my lawn was in the same condition as it was when I woke up. And, through no fault of my own: the problem was the freedom of others.

This, of course, is the crisis at the heart of liberal politics: containing freedom to your own property. And this explains the pervasive powers of the social welfare apparatuses: they don’t have property, so we can come in and examine at will. This is security in a Foucauldian sense: it doesn’t involve (at least in the first and second and third instances) guns and violence. It is far more subtle. Far more insidious.

And it is at the core of the Rural Revolution, a topic for another day.