{"id":3636,"date":"2020-06-10T15:16:07","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T19:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/?p=3636"},"modified":"2020-09-23T20:33:49","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T00:33:49","slug":"our-bodies-our-castles-our-countries-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/2020\/06\/10\/our-bodies-our-castles-our-countries-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Bodies, Our Castles, Our Countries, Ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh<\/a><\/p>\n

Book the Second.\u00a0 Of the RIGHTS of THINGS. Chapter the Tenth.\u00a0 Of Estates, upon Condition.<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

This chapter<\/a>\u00a0is haunted.\u00a0 The estates Blackstone describes here have an almost animate quality, popping up or disappearing \u201cupon the happening or not happening of some uncertain event.\u201d\u00a0 II. p. 152. \u00a0 At the same time, as I noted in my\u00a0previous post<\/a>, there\u2019s a sense that personal identity is more closely tied to, more explained and expressed by, real estate than it is today. \u00a0 You might even say that in the\u00a0Commentaries<\/i>, identity is more about the land and less about the body.\u00a0 This makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose, given that back in the eighteenth century bodies were seen to come and go a lot more frequently and unpredictably than they do now.\u00a0 Individual and social status in the world Blackstone describes are matters of real property, paradigmatically land.\u00a0 Nowadays, it seems, our bodies are our estates.<\/p>\n

Ever since I was a little girl I have wondered how our lives will look to people in the future.\u00a0 What are the things that now seem so naturally, unquestionably true but in a few centuries or even decades will seem laughable, idiotic and possibly evil?\u00a0 The irony, I suppose, is that my fascination with future spectators itself marks me as the product of a late-twentieth-century generation with an overblown sense of our unique place in history. But be that as it may, I can\u2019t help but wonder what aspects of my own worldview will look just as strange to the folks 200 years down the pike as estates\u00a0in vadio\u00a0<\/i>or in\u00a0gage<\/i>\u00a0 look to me now.\u00a0 II. p. 157.\u00a0 I\u2019m guessing that a certain frantic fascination with all things corporeal may be on the list.\u00a0 While Blackstone seems obsessed with land ownership, I see bodies everywhere.<\/p>\n

In Blackstone\u2019s world everything mysteriously turns into hereditary property.\u00a0 You probably wouldn\u2019t think that being fired for not doing your job involves a transfer of real estate.\u00a0 But Blackstone figures a park keeper\u2019s poaching or a judge\u2019s corruption as the violation of an estate each man was granted, that had \u201ca condition annexed to it inseparably, from it\u2019s [sic]essence and constitution, although no condition be expressed in words.\u201d II. p. 152.\u00a0 So the keeper can be fired for killing the deer he was hired to protect, or the judge for taking a bribe, because he acquired his job as a kind of estate to which \u201cthe law tacitly annexes . . .\u00a0 a secret condition, that the grantee shall duly execute his office, on breach of which condition it is lawful for the grantor, or his heirs, to oust him.\u201d II. \u00a0pp. 152-53.<\/p>\n

Before you dismiss the job-as-conditional-land-grant approach to professional corruption as a quaint old-fashioned twist on social problems we now approach directly, consider the propensity of our own age to turn practically any social issue into something to do with the nature and well being of individual human bodies.\u00a0 The failure to nurture and support young people becomes a childhood obesity epidemic; the debate about how much government should intervene in social welfare and redistribute wealth comes down to a battle over access to personal medical care; and criminal guilt or innocence is determined by the presence of microscopic amounts of saliva, dandruff, or ejaculate.<\/p>\n

Was there ever a culture so body-obsessed as upper-middle-class America in the twenty-first century?\u00a0 So tirelessly devoted to constructing and reconstructing explanations of who we are and how we should live in terms of the human body? So endlessly engaged by the pleasures and dangers of eating, the need and lack of time for physical exercise; the benefits of organic vegetables and the hazards of genetically engineered produce; breastfeeding; DNA evidence; genetic mapping; doping scandals; athletes\u2019 salaries, injuries, triumphs and corruption; cancer, cancer and more cancer; neuroimaging; Oprah\u2019s weight swings; yoga, pilates, water aerobics, and the importance of a good night\u2019s sleep . . . the list goes on and on.<\/p>\n

These days, physical appearance is understood to be a transparent reflection of character.\u00a0 A certain rail thin aerobic fitness is now generally thought to be a must for a national politician. So much so that when Chris Christie, the portly governor of New Jersey, was considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination,\u00a0pundits<\/a>\u00a0immediately predicted his defeat on the basis of obesity\u00a0\u00a0 (but see\u00a0Frank Bruni<\/a>).\u00a0 Consider the way the power of the first couple is expressed in their physical fitness, compared with, say Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Eisenhowers, Ronald and Nancy Regan. Michelle Obama\u2019s arms have been the subject of much greater fascination than her professional career or personal history.\u00a0 Off the top of my head I can\u2019t recall where she went to law school, but I do know what time she gets up in the morning to work out (5:30). Think about Michelle\u2019s arms and Eleanor\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just individual character traits that get expressed in bodies today.\u00a0 In the millennial United States, status maps directly onto our bodies.\u00a0 Higher socioeconomic status correlates relentlessly with healthier, more beautiful (by mainstream media standards) and longer-lived bodies.\u00a0 In the U.S. today, men in the top half of the country\u2019s wage distribution live about 6 years longer than those in the bottom half, and whites have an average life expectancy at birth about 5 years longer than African Americans.\u00a0\u00a0Brookings Institution<\/a>;\u00a0U.S. Census<\/a>.\u00a0 We hear a lot about growing socioeconomic inequality, but less about the\u00a0effects on longevity<\/a>\u00a0for those on the wrong side of the equality gap.\u00a0 Apparently, the life expectancy of the least educated Americans is actually falling.\u00a0\u00a0Olshansky et al<\/a>.\u00a0 For instance, between 1990 and 2008 white women in the U.S. with less than a high-school education lost an average of 5 years from their life expectancy.\u00a0Id.<\/em><\/p>\n

While the magnitude of the loss was startling, the strong correlation between privilege and longevity didn\u2019t surprise me.\u00a0 I am very used to the idea that a life further down the ladder of socioeconomic status is a shorter life.\u00a0 Indeed this relationship qualifies in my mind as a \u201cnatural\u201d correlation.\u00a0 But a book my daughter brought home recently for a social studies project taught me otherwise.\u00a0 This book (sadly I can\u2019t recall its title or author) informed me that during the American colonial period members of many Native American nations were generally taller and longer lived than the colonists. Now of course this comparison doesn\u2019t involve different statuses within the same society and has one easy explanation \u2013 at the time, the Indians were much better fed. Still, it reminded me that the correlation between longevity and capital is contingent and led me to wonder whether that correlation could be traced to a particular time and place.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, a fascinating paper by\u00a0S. Ryan Johansson informs us that in pre-modern Europe the upper classes did\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0enjoy any particular health or longevity benefits. \u00a0Medics, Monarchs and Mortality 1600-1800.<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0In modern times \u201ceconomically and socially privileged groups invariably live longer than average, while the lowest income groups live the shortest times or all.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Id.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>But it was not ever thus.\u00a0 Indeed, according to Johansson, up to the 1700s, mortality rates were approximately the same for \u201cprinces and peasants.\u201d\u00a0Id.<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0It seems the eighteenth century was a watershed in this as in so many features of our modern Western society. \u00a0\u00a0Until the 1700s, \u201cEurope\u2019s wealthiest and most socially advantaged families had surprisingly low levels of life expectancy, levels that were very much the same as those of the European peasantry.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Id.<\/i>\u00a0at\u00a0 8.\u00a0 \u00a0But something happened in Blackstone\u2019s century \u2013 at least in Europe \u2014 that connected bodies to economies in ways that had not been true before.<\/p>\n

Since that time the correlation between social class and longevity has held despite huge changes in when and how we die. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was still infectious illness, accident and childbirth that did most folks in, and death was frequent, if not routine, across the life course.\u00a0 Now it is mostly chronic illness, cancer and heart disease that finish us off, and mostly in a very compressed period at the end of our life span.\u00a0 Yet, despite all these shifts, for the last three hundred years\u2013but only for the last three hundred years \u2013the correlation between social privilege and longevity has not budged.\u00a0 It does kind of make you wonder about the claim that modernity brings class mobility.<\/p>\n

It makes perfect sense that bodies would become more important socially, and that individual identity would come to be more closely associated with the body, just when socioeconomic class distinctions became more consistently expressed in the most basic bodily characteristic \u2014 mortality.\u00a0 If you wonder why twenty-first century America is such a body-obsessed culture, look no further than the fact that lower social class correlates reliably and dramatically with increased morbidity and earlier death. Then again, the same correlation may have explanatory power for Blackstone\u2019s property-centered worldview.\u00a0 After all the connection between wealth and longevity was just beginning in his time.\u00a0 Possibly Blackstone was clinging , consciously or not, to an index of social hierarchy that cuts against the grain of mortality rather than along it.\u00a0 In the feudal society that produced the property structures Blackstone so lovingly chronicles, lives may have been \u201cnasty, brutish, and short,<\/a>\u201d but they were no shorter on account of class differences.<\/p>\n

The same cannot be said of the U.S. today, where people with less money, power, education and, yes real property, are more likely to die sooner, to die violently,\u00a0 to get sick, and to suffer crippling and painful disabilities.\u00a0 If land and houses were once upon a time the primary exposition of social status, now it is written on our bodies.<\/p>\n

There is an interesting reversal of the land-to-body trend where government is concerned.\u00a0 Nowadays we tend to associate a state with its geographical territory, whereas premodern nation states were more immediately identified with the bodies of their rulers.\u00a0 Recall that kings were called by their countries\u2019 names: Henry VIII is \u201cEngland,\u201d Louis\u00a0 XIV simply \u201cFrance.\u201d\u00a0 In a sense that is hard for us to understand now, a country was actually located in the body of the man who ruled it.\u00a0 To most twenty-first century eyes the identification of the man and the realm looks like a kind of mysticism, but you could also see it as a more accurate perception about the man-made character of nation states.<\/p>\n

Nowadays we tend to identify the state of, say, Pennsylvania as the land represented by the irregular pastel rectangle on the map.\u00a0 Somewhere along the line we substituted geography for personality as the preeminent basis of state identity.\u00a0 We think of the territory as the\u00a0real\u00a0<\/i>Pennsylvania and the state\u2019s power, policies and civic spirit metaphors for the physical reality.\u00a0 But of course that is backwards. \u00a0And every bit as primitively inaccurate as the identification of the real England with Henry VIII\u2019s body.\u00a0 To the extent that a state has a reality outside of collective metaphor it is in that numinous power, that ghostly corporate planning, that shared sense of collective identity \u2014 and the land is the metonym, the material place holder that we use to think about and refer to a reality that is otherwise hard to grasp.\u00a0 The territory mapped by the U.S. geographical survey comes about as close to representing Pennsylvania the State as those plastic models we used to have in grade school with their golf-ball-sized electrons and protons frozen on thick wire orbits came to capturing atomic energy.<\/p>\n

It seems unavoidable that models from bygone days appear clunky and misleading, even downright false, while current versions escape criticism.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t exactly that today\u2019s models seem better.\u00a0 It\u2019s more that we just don\u2019t notice them, or their \u2018modelness\u2019 at all.\u00a0 Take costume dramas.\u00a0 In films shot in the 1950s, medieval royal robes and peasant jerkins look obviously fake, and different from the costumes designed in the 1930s or the 1970s, even when they all mimic the same historical designs. In period dramas made today, the cuts and colors of the present are transparent; but in a decade or two they will start to appear in costumes that look wonderfully authentic to us now.<\/p>\n

Likewise we cannot help but see our current human-body-centered sense of self as more realistic than the eighteenth century land-based self.\u00a0 It seems far more natural to identify with the unique physical entities that pop from our mothers on our birthdays and end at the moment of their inevitable demise.\u00a0 After all, to connect yourself with your body you don\u2019t need a complicated ritual involving clots of earth and fancy phrases, you don\u2019t need legal documents \u2013 all you need is a mirror (and incidentally mirrors were quite rare in feudal times).\u00a0 Except it turns out that, biologically speaking, the whole idea of the human body as a singular, skin bounded, individually organized entity with a unique birth and death date is pretty much a fiction.\u00a0 Another clunky model.\u00a0 As\u00a0Scientific American<\/i><\/a>\u00a0puts it \u201cthe human body is not such a neatly self-sufficient island after all.\u00a0 It is more like a complex ecosystem.\u201d\u00a0 Over the last decade microbiologists have identified literally trillions of organisms that live inside, outside, on and around the space we call our bodies. \u00a0Apparently the idea that each of us inhabits a separable human body on a single discrete pathway through time and space is every bit as mythological as the premodern idea that the royal version of such a body is the home of the nation.\u00a0 In fact it seems that most of the stuff inside the space we call \u201cthe human body\u201d is not human at all.\u00a0 In that \u201cecosystem\u201d microorganisms outnumber human cells ten to one. \u00a0Id.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>Any separation between our bodies and the rest of the world is utterly permeable.\u00a0 Suddenly the idea of a castle or a fenceable farm embodying my one true self doesn\u2019t seem quite so deluded.<\/p>\n

Originally Published November 5, 2012.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Book the Second.\u00a0 Of the RIGHTS of THINGS. Chapter the Tenth.\u00a0 Of Estates, upon Condition. This chapter\u00a0is haunted.\u00a0 The estates Blackstone describes here have an almost...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[268,255,492],"tags":[132,200],"class_list":["post-3636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jurisprudence","category-law-and-philosophy","category-william-blackstone","tag-news","tag-william-blackstone"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pasVL2-WE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3637,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3636\/revisions\/3637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}