Misadventures in the Land of Fables #45

‘A Monument for a Lion‘

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When I wrote this fable, I neglected to make notes on the process. A week later, I had forgotten how and why it had come about, where the idea originated or what I was thinking at the time. Fortunately, I had written about the episode in my journal.

It was a response to a discussion I witnessed on Twitter (aka X). The original post, more of an essay or screed, was entitled ‘Capitalism and the Way of the Dog’ and was written as a response to the claim that “property law” was a social construct and not “a natural mode of being.”

CONSIDER THE DOG

Consider the dog, wrote the author, Dmitry. “You can test this ‘property rights are innate’ claim very easily. Go up to the next dog you see with a bone or food, and take it from him… Watch his reaction.” Hostile, Dmitry asserted. In addition to the dog, Dmitry wanted us to consider the wasps and their nest, the lioness and its prey (a zebra), the crow and the shiny objects he collects. All intended as examples of the assertion of property rights in nature.

I felt I had to respond, for two reasons. One, because the argument didn’t seem quite right: it was reductive but, on the other hand, it was not without merit. An interesting combination. Moreover, it cut straight to the point where politics, philosophy, and economics collide. Also literature. Dmitry’s use of animal examples reminded me of the classical function of fable as elements of rhetoric.

I wanted to unpick his argument. Or complicate it. That’s how I tend to respond to reductive claims. And I am particularly uneasy about claims concerning what is natural or not. These claims always strike me as normative and exclusionary. What is the attraction, I wonder? Is it because to be natural is self-evidently right and unnatural wrong?

So I did as Dmitry suggested. I considered the dog. I considered the wasp. And I considered ‘the lioness and the zebra she had captured.’ This is what I concluded about the latter.

THE LIONESS AND THE ZEBRA

The lioness eats the zebra. That’s why she hunted it down and killed it. You might say for a brief period, from the killing to the end of the meal, the lioness considers the zebra’s carcass as its property. Any attempt to take it away from her would be deterred with violence or the threat of violence. This would seem a fairly uncontroversial observation.

But why stop there? Doesn’t there come a point when the lioness moves on, having eaten her fill, a point where the scavengers take over? Hyenas, vultures, also rodents and insects consume the remainder of the carcass. The lioness doesn’t take more than she things she needs. She doesn’t assert property rights over the excess. And she doesn’t hoard.

But what if she were to hoard? How would that look? Would it be considered equally natural? This is the question I asked, and I recalled the lions encountered here in the land of fables: the lion who terrorized the forest with its rampaging, ‘The Lion and the Hares‘; the lion that bullied its partners into giving up their share—there’s a few of those: ‘The Lion’s Share‘ ‘The Wolf, the Fox, and the Lion‘.

And that’s how I came to write ‘A Monument for a Lion‘

Let me know your thoughts.