Knowing that I am an insufferable rat, the Most Merciful, Blessed be He, surrounded me with a few Great People to cushion my otherwise horrible effect on human society. Yes, by preemptive grace, I have made friends with several bricks, some assorted saints, and half a dozen really good eggs. They keep no common code, obey no monastic rule, but these standup fellows share several habits worth publishing for the edification of the horrible. They all squat down on their haunches to talk to children. They tend to wake up early, though they don’t go out of their way to tell you about it. They are more amused by our evil world than morbidly offended; prone to offer a joke, rather than a curse, as a remedy. But these pillars of the human edifice share another curve of character that has always surprised me: they all seem inclined to shoot drones.
I met Wendell Berry a few years ago. The professor who introduced our class to his writing wrote him a letter. He responded by drawing a map to his property and writing an invitation to the same. The radical communitarian farmer and his wife made us laugh until it was time to move the sheep. And it does not surprise me that this happy, happy man, reflecting upon what, if anything, was missing from his life, said, “What I would like to do, better than anything, would be to shoot a drone.” By my count, he shares this passion for destruction with a Dominican priest, a mother of nine, and a teacher who has never been known to say an angry word. It is anecdotal, but no less true for the fact: Good people don’t like delivery robots.
A man might complain that the daydream of exploding an Amazon drone is childish; especially, I suppose, if he were the one responsible for flying it. But we have it on good authority that the kingdom of Heaven is a place reserved for children. And I have yet to meet a child who lets a drone buzz into his periphery without tracking its motion with a solemn finger gun; without firing two or three bullets into its blinking machinery; without achieving with the grim satisfaction of his imagination that destruction his adult counterparts would achieve with a well-aimed firearm. Childish, childish—but is drone-shooting a way of reasoning as a child, to be put away in order to rise into our full stature? Or is it an activity of the little ones whom Christ suffers to come unto Him?
One principle of biblical interpretation holds that whatever the cantankerous and oft-disagreeing Fathers of the Church unanimously agree upon is infallibly true. Well, the only people I know who stand a halfway decent chance at being named Father of the Church are also most likely to be named destroyer of those little remote-controlled planes forever filming people at music festivals.
Another principle of theology proclaims the existence of an unerring sense of the faithful for the truth of what has been handed down—the sensus fidelium. Well, I have met the fidelis, and their sensus seems set on getting robotic police dogs to go play fetch on a minefield. Suffice to say that, wherever a people customarily opposed to violence and disruption spontaneously agree that something should be violently disrupted, it strikes me as worth looking into, as when ents go to war or children go on crusade.
There is some scandal here. The moral intuition of the good men I know inclines them to the destruction of private property. Even the apocryphal story of St. Thomas Aquinas, who was said to have destroyed an automaton invented by his teacher, St. Albert the Great, does not quite settle the issue—though, if true, it would add a Church-approved godly man to my list of robot hunters. As far as I know, my Good Guys are prudent enough not to involve themselves or their families in criminal activity, but virtue is supposed to correct the very desire for crime, not merely the committing of one. The man whose hand twitches but does not pickpocket is still a habitual thief, even if he should be commended for his moral effort, and the man who ardently wishes for a bazooka when an unmanned aircraft drifts into his horizon—well, you get the drift.
Thankfully, I have discerned the situation. I have tested the spirits. I do not think that the desire to shoot a drone is a libertarian twitch or any other irate, American horror that a thing might trespass A Private Space—though I am sure my drone-shooting saints could make an alliance with the gung-ho and the freedom-loving here, as they seem to have purchased all the firearms.
Mr. Berry, in something of a poetic flight, does try to justify his destructive appetite within the acceptable logic of private property, saying that “it has seemed reasonable to me to suppose that my proprietary rights begin at a point at the center of the Earth, rise up from there to my surface boundaries, and from there extend outward, maintaining their vertical trajectories, infinitely into the sky—and, therefore, that I might very properly collect a toll for any use of the aerial right-of-way between my line fences...
My trees, for example, I believe to be standing free in my own air and light. Do I then not have the right, below at least the tops of my tallest trees, or the tallest trees of their species, to live and breathe freely in my own unharming peace? And do I then not have the right to shoot down with any weapon legally available to me a drone invading that space?
But this is not so much Berry in all his seriousness as Berry resisting a full conversion to Catholicism. For the drone is not, first and foremost, an offender against the private as against the commons—that great, proto-legal reality which only the Catholic Church seems to be willing to defend. Berry’s annoyance at the hovering drone does not begin when it crosses his mythical property lines, which rocket into the void and make him titular owner of whatever asteroid or planet lingers in his acreage. The approach of the unmanned aircraft on the horizon annoys him. Its presence outside of his aerial property sets him on edge. As I write this, I am watching Pittsburghers avoid a remote-controlled, four-wheeled (grocery?) cart with looks of disgust as it lurches along their sidewalk. A drunk guy in a Steelers jersey pretended to kick it. Concerned property owners, defending their rights? No, a more ancestral fire boils the Pittsburgh blood; something less fitting to the Enlightenment rationalist, with his deeds and their grids; something more fitting to the unenlightened peasant he replaced.
Of course, one may make a convoluted argument that the approach, exit, and nearby buzzing of Amazon’s drones is the trespass of other people’s aerial holdings, and so a forewarning that the drone will inevitably penetrate one’s own. But one may also jump off a bridge. It is more simple to say of the drone-addled air that “we all breathe it” as we might say of the sidewalk that “we all walk it.” There is a trespassing which is not against private or public property, because there is property which is neither public nor private. I agree with Mr. Berry, that he owns his trees, but he would likely agree with me that, were he to decorate their tops with pornographic banners, scandalized parents would, and should, put him in the stocks. The trunk may begin on private property, but only a psychopath would deny that the tree-top enters a property common to all: the view. The view is a commons—the object of a common gaze and a common use. Berry, reaching for his shotgun, is not defending his property lines. He is more noble than that. He is defending the commons, the sky of which he is owner, policeman, and protector, not as a private person, but as a member of a “we” which has customary use and enjoyment of the air above our heads.
This shouldn’t be so hard to grasp, but the habit of dividing the world into squares for sale to private owners has made it a slippery subject. In order to remember the commons, one must remember the Creation: that the world was given to all of us. Within this understanding, private ownership is simply a contingent jurisdiction and power one person takes over a Creation Given To All in order to serve others more, and not less. This is the Catholic turn, and it makes him a stranger and sojourner in a liberal social order. We do not have homes to exclude the world, but to more effectively eat, sleep, and raise children to serve it. We do not erect fences to keep out our neighbors, except to more effectively give them the fruit of what we fence. It is true that, when we labor, we transform the material of this world into an extension of our person, making it “personal property” in a profound sense—but our person is not opposed to the whole community. It is a member of a greater body. Only pagans have privacy, and even with them, it is a lie, some vain effort to make the bedroom, the church, or the business into magical places wherein the part is no longer in communion with the whole, and the individual can do what he wants, without reference to his neighbor.
No, even within this regime of private property, in which everything is supposedly owned by someone with a deed, the teaching of the Church stays true: the claim of private ownership is either a mode of service to the common good or it is an unjustified claim—that is, theft. This does not mean that the contingent jurisdiction we call “private property” is not natural, real or good—it is all three, which is why the Church defends it against thieves, vandals, and any who would dare deny a worker the fruit of his labor. But that something is natural, real, and good does not make it absolute or all-encompassing.
Some things explicitly given over to common use, things for which the contingent care of private ownership is no help to their becoming fruitful, bear fruit precisely in being owned and used by a community: horizons, rivers, walkways, oceans, and shared farmland; places of customary congregation like city streets, sidewalks, parks, and living rooms. And a common space inspires certain modes of care. The good and peaceful use of a common place is not determined a priori, by reference to some constitution or rulebook drafted up by a private owner or his board of trustees. Rather, it is determined by reference to the peace of its members. To the question, what is permitted? the commons answers, whatever does not disturb the peace of the whole community using the common space.
If this seems odd, anarchist, or flippant, I offer no defense, beyond the obvious fact that most people seem happy being so odd and anarchistic. I move aside for another as we pass on a sidewalk, even as he does the same for me. We are obeying no positive law—we are obeying a custom. If some psychopathic sociology graduate accosted us, demanding a reason why we deferred our forward mobility in such and such a way, our answers would give evidence of a sense of the peace and a natural desire to maintain it: “I don’t want to get in the other guys’ way,” “we’ve all got somewhere to be,” “no point bumping into people,” and so forth.
It would be madness to assert some positive legal right to walk any way one pleases: “I see that oncoming foot-traffic is on my left, but I will walk into it, because it’s a free country, and no law says I have to walk on one side or the other!” One would do best to push such a freethinker into an oncoming bus, second best to respond with Aquinas, who would argue that “custom has the force of a law,” and that such a libertarian-minded fool is more properly called a criminal than one who violates a written city ordinance. The latter offends against the letter, and the former sins against the spirit; the latter breaks a written law, but the former breaks with the primordial peace between man and man, the source and judge of all positive law.
Because the right use of a commons is determined by reference to the peace of its members, its members are predisposed to value those acts and behaviors which allow that peace to be assessed, weighed, and felt. When two men, in a private establishment, begin to feel a rift in their mutual accord, one says to the other: “Let’s take this outside.” The conflict is moved from a private place to a common place, in large part because men are adverse to breaking the barstools of businesses they hope to visit soon after. But “the outside” is also where conflict can be weighed, where men can be seen and seen generally, by any ad hoc surveyor of the common peace. Just as it is natural for men to look about for a common place to exchange blows, it is natural for other men to want to go with them, to flood out of the bar as a society, however sober; to serve as judges of the conflict; to egg it on where it needs to be egged on; to shame cowardice on the one hand and to boo cruelty on the other; to demand peace when it becomes possible; to declare certain actions “too far”; to undermine any excess of seriousness with jokes, and to otherwise become the ad hoc judges and officers of the peace. The outside is in view.
The requisite virtue of common places is truthfulness, by which “one shows oneself outwardly by outward sign to be such as one is” (ST, II-II, q. 109, a. 3). This truthfulness should not be mistaken for some flaccid authenticity, wherein one dresses, speaks, and acts without any ornament or decorum fitting for common life, behaving, as my teachers accused me, “like you are still wearing pajamas in your living room.” This refusal to emerge from one’s tent has the appearance of truthfulness, but in fact, it is an extension of private property at the expense of the commons: one treats what belongs to all as if it were one’s own. One rudely denies that one is in a commons at all.
It is in this respect that we should consider the drone, a certain mechanical shamelessness, strutting the regime of private property into our last remaining commons—our air, our sidewalks, our streets. A drone is remote-controlled, which is simply to say that the person who uses it disables himself from the virtue of truthfulness, by which the outward sign is ordered towards the revelation of the person, and by which the peace of the commons can be assessed. He has a hand in the commons, as it were, but his rear is firmly planted within private property. One cannot see his face or divine his intentions. He acts outside but remains indoors.
When two men move aside for each other on a city sidewalk, it is because they are present to each other, because their intentions can be read by face and by gait. Where, by accident or breach in custom, the two run into each other, the situation can be remedied—the peace can be assessed and restored. This is precisely the tragic humor of this absurd little Pittsburgh buggy, lurching to its programmed destination. The human beings walking next to it simply have no idea what it will do, cannot judge its turns, do not understand why it stops when it does, and do not know if they are intruding within the range of its mobility. Embarrassment, awkwardness, nervous laughter, and the giving of berth seem to dominate the reactions of the Pittsburgh people. The drone does not represent some invasion of their private property but an enclosing of their commons, a cowardly breach of custom and decorum by which one person enters into a space governed by ad hoc assessments of the peace, while masking themselves from this very assessment. Of course, the motions of the drone will one day become seamless. But this will not be the inclusion of the robot into the commons, but the loss of the commons for the logic of the robot. At least when one feels, painfully, the lack of truthfulness within a common space, one is still fighting for the commons and its logic of peace.
At the end of the day, one cannot fight a drone. One cannot alter its path any more than one can judge it. It tends to have an alarm system to prevent such moments of fraternal correction. Its presence puts people on edge, precisely because the peace is now nebulous, out of reach. Typically, violence asserts itself in its stead, and the order of the drone-infested sidewalk becomes legal, defined by positive law and static rights. To the question, what is permitted? the commons now answers things like: “If interrupted, alarm will sound,” “Please keep back five feet.”
The peace of common places requires that all its members be at least potentially fightable, which means they must also be potentially friendly. Drones mean that some members of common places are only sue-able and never even potentially friendly. The good men I have met desire to destroy drones, as if by a common impulse, and I understand this as something fitting to their sanctity rather than an exception to its holy rule. For there is no good egg who does not love justice, the “foremost among all the moral virtues” (ST., II-II, q. 58, a. 12). And the peak of justice is not some simpering righteousness, individual purity, or private sanctity, rather, justice regards “those things which belong to social life,” and “the entire order between one man and another” (q. 58, a. 8). The just man is the one with a special care of the commons, for that common good which transcends his individual good. He is adverse, not simply to explicit attacks on the peace of his community, but to those behaviors which render communal jurisdiction and peace unattainable. He does not wince at the trespass of his private property so much as at the shameless colonization of the commons; he desires an explosion, not merely for his own sake, but for his people; he longs for liberation from nameless, faceless, and unapproachable ones who nevertheless make a business of the common sky, of the Earth given to all.