Who is ‘My’ Property for, Anyway? Property and the Common Good (Part 2)

This is the fourth in a series of articles Colin Miller is writing for The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It’s reprinted here with his permission.

In the February edition of the Catholic Citizen I wrote about a neighbor boy, Sam, who helped make concrete for me the Church’s social teaching that property is only legitimately “mine” when it is used for the common good. We hold property not “absolutely”—to use and abuse it however we want—but for the sake of our communities.

Sam had been borrowing one of our bikes as he played with my kids, and, when it was time for us to go in for naps that afternoon, my first instinct was to think, “OK Sam, that’s my bike, and so it’s time for you to stop riding it.” But this, I eventually realized, hardly squared with the ideal that property is for the common good, and so I changed my mind and let him keep using it.

But no sooner had I closed the door when the common worry hit me: “Oh no, all this high idealism just means Sam’s going to hurt himself riding my bike on my sidewalk, and then we are going to get sued.”

And this led me to further reflection. For it occurred to me, in a rare moment of clarity, that this kind of worry is itself part of the way that our culture’s “absolute” notion of property becomes deeply engrained in each of our lives. What do I have in mind?

Let’s consider what went into making me think it was “my” bike—in the absolute sense—in the first place. That idea didn’t just fall out of thin air; it was shaped in me by a variety of common cultural experiences like this one. In other words, it was at least as much my worry about being sued, and the ever-present reality of lawsuits that stood behind it, that produced my idea of property, as it was the other way around. The practice of suing itself has, as part of its internal logic, a notion of property as “absolutely” belonging to one person and not another. So, when I think “I’m going to get sued because that’s my bike,” to use the word “sued” in this way must, at the same time, be to use “my bike” in a particular way—the absolute way. We receive many of our beliefs from our cultural environment in this way, even when we’re not conscious of it.

But this means that we inevitably come to believe all kinds of things—some true, some false—simply by participating in common social practices. In this case, Sam helped me realize, the simple existence of lawsuits, and worrying about lawsuits, “train” me over time to see the bike as “my bike” in an “absolute” way. An unchristian way of viewing property is, in other words, like those Russian tea dolls, embedded within the common cultural practice of suing, and worrying about being sued. And this was as much a cause of my view of property as it was an effect.

Then I realized just how many more unconscious influences there are on my view of property. To live in a society where we regularly sue each other for just about anything is also inevitably to live in a society where we take out insurance policies on just about everything. This means that the logic of insurance increasingly reaches into the far corners of our lives, determining what we can and can’t do, what we can and can’t have, and sometimes even who we can associate with and when. Under these conditions, as sociologists have remarked, “risk” has for the first time in history become a dominant social category—even a sort of “entity” that we think we “see” in the world.

Lawsuits, insurance, risk—and we could add to this any number of other things like property codes, a money economy, liability, consumer culture, single-use-disposable containers—all of this and much more do not only reflect an idea of property, but also produce it. For they help make a world where every item belongs “absolutely” to someone, rather than “loosely” as a trust for the purpose of building community. I realized that day with Sam that my life was woven into a network of such practices that made that view of the world seem “natural” to me.

And so, finally, Sam helped me realize yet another reason the Scriptures insist so strongly on Church community. For in the same way the broader secular community makes one view of property seem “natural,” so too, if we want to live Catholically regarding property, we are going to have to have a Catholic community in which to realize it. The Church tells us that property is for the common good, for others, and for our communities, and that it is really only “ours” for this purpose. But if we want to actually come to see the world in this way, and to live this truth—to make it seem “natural”—we are going to have to embed those ideas in real material practices with real flesh and blood people. And this, of course, is just what the early Church did in the Acts of the Apostles. Their sharing of life, of possessions, of daily prayer, of meals, so that they had “all things in common,” were a means of training themselves into a brand-new way, God’s way, of seeing their “stuff.” The Scriptures and the more recent social teaching of the Church, call us to the same task. But we can only start, obviously, from where we are. Most of us live nothing like the early Church did. But the good news is that we don’t have to get there all at once. We just have to put one baby step in front of another. Let’s not worry about what we can’t do, and just get on with what we can do. We can share meals with friends more regularly. We can start to pray together. We can share a car with our spouse, or a lawnmower with a neighbor. We can, as I realized, just let Sam keep riding the bike, because it’s for him as much as it’s for me. Things like this go just a little way towards making the line between “mine” and “yours” just a little blurrier. And that’s how it should be.

This essay originally appeared in the April 2024 edition of The Catholic Citizen.