Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [109]
“You hush up your mouth!” howled the mighty King Yertle.
“You’ve no right to talk to the world’s highest turtle.
I rule from the clouds! Over land! Over sea!
There’s nothing, no, NOTHING, that’s higher than me!” (Yertle)
This is a problem for Mack: what to do with a tyrannical sovereign. When the sovereign no longer serves the end for which he was created, can you overthrow him? What are the moral reasons one might give for revolution? To address these questions, it may be helpful to turn to that philosopher who was so influential for our own revolutionary history.
To Protect (the Private Property of) Turtles
Men being . . . by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent.
—John Locke4
John Locke (1632–1704) imagines quite a different world prior to the formation of civil society. Unlike Hobbes’s state of nature as a “war of all against all,” Locke imagines a state of nature without the conflict induced by scarcity—a state in which individuals have the “freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”5 In Sala-ma-Sond this means that each turtle is free to live without the interference of others regarding her “life, health, liberty, or possessions.”6 In this era before the social contract, we are bound together not by political structures (which only come into existence with the social contract) but by an innate morality and voluntary agreements. Nonetheless, the state of nature, for Locke, “is not a state of license; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it.”7
The opportunity for conflict in Locke’s state of nature is pretty much limited to disputes over property. The problem is that there is no authority to which to appeal if we feel we’ve been wronged. So each of us must seek equity on our own terms. As the parties involved are unlikely to agree regarding what one owes the other, it risks a long-running tit-for-tat feud or even violence. By contracting together to create a civil government, the turtles gain a standardized measure and method for property disputes.
But why is private property so important for Locke? Locke held that the earth was given to all of us for our subsistent use—essentially the earth is a commons to be used by all. Nature’s raw material becomes a turtle’s private property once that material has been mixed with that turtle’s labor—this land becomes hers in the act of tilling, that fruit becomes his by the act of collecting it, etc.8 As indicated above, this labor theory of value is not unlimited—taking more than one’s fair share is theft from the rest of turtlekind. For Locke, this understanding of individuals as proprietors with private property in need of protection is the drive to escape the state of nature and the creation of civil society. We have a natural right to our property and thus need a means to secure it against others.
Civil society then is created via the social contract, but it is a contract designed for the protection of private property, and thus our natural rights. Each contractor surrenders the right to individually protect herself and to individually pursue transgressions and instead places that power in the state creating “one body politic,”9 in which each member is subject to the will of the majority. With government, the contractors gain a set of laws, judges to adjudicate disputes, and an executive power to enforce those laws. But unlike Hobbes—for whom the formation of the social contract was a one-off event—Locke leaves open the possibility of tearing up the contract. Given that the state was established as a means of protection,