John Locke, Slavery and Psychology

‘John Locke was the first philosopher to discover The New World and to make its existence the major component of a political philosophy.’ Herman Lebovics. The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 47. No 4. 1986. A slave being used for gynaecology experiments by J. Marion Sims, The Father of Gynaecology. Slavery constructed notions of the other in the early 19th century that were continued into later paradigms of psychiatry and psychology, providing concepts of difference. Psychology evolved as a consequence of Western culture’s interactions with the rest of the world and was initially an attempt to legitimise its conquest behaviour and ideas behind that behaviour. Locke’s work can be seen as attempting to find an ideology by which the land of native peoples could be appropriated outside of the claims of religion. His work on citizenship and the nature of human personality constructed an understanding of human character upon bourgeois concepts, which appear the obverse of those of indigenous Americans, and established the concept of normality freely and erroneously employed by psychiatry. Locke became aware of America as it came under systematic colonisation with a large number of British settlements on the East Coast. He actually purchased land in Carolina and served on government bodies that oversaw the development of the new colonies around the world. He made his money through his involvement with America, West Indies and India. Locke’s justification for the rights of private properly directly reflected American conditions of colonisation whereby land was taken from native peoples on the basis that they did not engage in ownership, and in effect rejected individual land ownership. Colonisation expressed as land appropriation thereby gained through Locke its legal, psychological and philosophical justification. Locke based his actual logic on religious arguments: God gave the world to mankind (women did not yet have legal rights), therefore logically British colonists had a right to America: God expected, indeed insisted, that mankind make proper use of the land-that is farmed according to the fertility tropes of ancient Judaism. The extermination of the native population was an accepted possible result of the above according to the genocide narratives around Moses and Joshua, which were based on who owned Palestine- land the tender-hearted YHWH had given to the Hebrews and who therefore considered the eviction by death of its Canaanite occupants a reasonable development. Locke openly declared that the American natives had no right to the land they had lived on for thousands of years as such land belonged to whoever laboured on it, which erroneously he believed the native occupiers did not. The European migrants were then driven to establish property on its green and pleasant vistas. Man (not women of course) thereby was defined as middle-class property owners who either worked regularly at waged work or had their own business, albeit a farm. This is certainly the basis for psychiatry’s model of the normal, sane citizen, and for psychologies sane and balanced average man-or woman. Rationality becomes humankind’s certain characteristic. Such people make up a civilised countries’ citizens and are the ones in any state that, in possession of property, have rights according to the nature of the given state. The natives meanwhile are declared wild, subhuman and expendable. They were objectified and as can be seen classified. Creating even greater distance between civilised souls and savages Locke inserted the essentiality of money (not exchange, mind) as a significant token of both labour and property. Lebovic holds that Locke introduces coinage in order to eliminate the justification of Native Americans to possessing a visible and viable economy based on celebration, ceremony and exchange. It is along this path on which lies slavery as another classifying function. Slaves are bought and sold representing here another level of wildness, inferiority and objectification. Native Americans were dismissed according to their relationship to the land, but black slaves have a relationship to property owning and coinage. They were thereby effectively two steps removed from citizen or human rights. Locke was the voice of a new bourgeois elite and created justification for that elite within property, money and citizenship. State rights and sanity (or normality) were arbitrarily connected forming thereby notions of the balanced mind with a connection to citizen responsibilities. Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice. Degler, Carl. N. (1959) Comparative Studies in Culture and History. Vol.2 Issue 1. Pages 49-66. As a slave was property they too must be expendable as only the slave’s owner can have rights, which further justifies the slave owning citizens’ right to ownership of another human being. The slave owner possesses property and money, the slave possesses neither. Nevertheless, if a human being can be enslaved what stops any slave owner from being enslaved too if they lose their property and money? This is where a man or woman’s colour and origins are factored in and further classifying is introduced to clarify social, personality and psychological difference between dominate and suppressed groups. American slavery as an institution considered any human being with a drop of African (black) blood- a metaphor for heritage-must and not could be enslaved. In order to fulfil such a dire aim, different categories were introduced that reflected the degree of blackness any individual demonstrated. A white person could effectively be declared black and enslaved if it was proved a parent or grandparent was actually white. Other classifications involved age, healthy appearance and temperament, which were associated with money. From here, it is not far to the development of intelligence tests that preference property owners with savings of gold and silver coins (Galton, Francis:1869) Heredity Genius. Galton postulated that intelligence is inherited. Nevertheless, his arguments are based on exclusive notions of permanence and class.. Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man 1982. W.W. Norton Company. presents the case for the doubtful basis of intelligence testing, often against a background of social inequality and scientific prejudice. The problem that he did not deal with perhaps is the need, indeed even biological need, in huge human societies to classify its individual and group components. Measuring is nevertheless a strange and awkward device that probably arose through the development of writing (representation) as a means of quantifying exchange. The use of measuring for exams and intelligence beggars the question of its use except as a tool to separate people and install an unreliable criterion of elitism. None of this involves the first use of classification of human beings. The Greeks classified other ethnic groups, and the Abrahamic religions routinely classified those groups that worshiped other gods. In 17th century England London citizens began routinely to be categorised according to class, with moral determinates and temperament associated with levels of savings or property owned. Usually, the only citizens of a state not subjected to typology were the elite. The elite then as now classified others. Where differences do not actually exist, they are imagined. Even now, anyone without employment is likely to be classified negatively, and those with both money and property are classified positively. Although both can suffer problems (sic) with their mental health the diagnosis is likely to be different according to money and property owned and of course for each and every group a member of society’s elite will provide the classification. My previous papers have railed against the literary, archetypal classifications of the DSM as they can and will cause harm and provide a false sense of psychiatric efficacy. To embody individuals within a few sentences must cause immense present and future harm to patients as well as providing a false science to back up an elite group. Groups are commonly separated according to ideas of better and worse, superior and inferior corresponding to economic requirements. Although we habitually perceive elite groupings as individually displaying higher intelligence (Gould: 1982) for example this may not be the case but simply illustrate a groups, or individuals, harnessing of select resources. Correspondingly, professional status may concern not knowledge and efficacy but a specific harnessing of resources based on family, educational opportunities and caste. In response to Locke’s understanding of effective societies, such elites classify those around them or as in mental health those who provide resources for individual professionals-patients. Colonisation The colonisation of other countries helped create many of the ideas in the present world. Locke’s insistence on ownership of property and/or land creating a balanced, useful personality drove the desire to place itinerant or surplus populations to colonies where land, ignoring of course the resident populations, was freely available. There people, even criminals, could become useful citizens. In the vastness of the New World each citizen could obtain their rights through ownership-although this clearly did not apply to the indigenous population. Nevertheless, the drive to obtain assumed citizenship rights proved a valuable encouragement to the development of institutional democracy based on the rights of sections of the populations, a number that grew as determined by the extension of waged work and ownership of land, savings and later commodities. Locke’s additional insistence that the rights to land in the New World, over the natural rights of the indigenous population, could be understood as Rational through Industry. Thereby components of the mind, understood as rational and scientific, were connected to labour, money and ownership. The very soul of man was hereby colonised. America, Locke argued, gave all people the chance to own property and become proprietors, which must be seen through a telescope’s narrow eyepiece as rational, reasonable and normal. The dismissal of the rights of the indigenous population is seen in Locke’s raising and twinning of labour and the right thereby of Europeans to remove native populations from the land. The concepts Locke deftly united of life, liberty and property constructed not only the justification for colonisation, the growing middle-class but equally for constructs of mental balance. A rational man owned property, worked for his living, and used currency. Not owning property, earning a living on a regular basis, and not having much money indicated inability to own citizenship or/and mental instability, an accumulated definition seen even now in psychiatry. While this provides a negative estimate of John Locke’s views nevertheless his notions of human personality were constructed against the Right of Kings and the political rights of noble birth, and formulated a notion of individuality that produced immense sociological and economic justifications. The self-consciousness of human beings according to Locke is both displayed within material properties and ownership but also insists that without that material self-consciousness other human beings (hunter gatherers for example) are insufficiently conscious, thereby insufficiently human. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (Various pub.) This can be translated onto mental illness as a materialist default. Ainslee, Donald C/ Ware, Owen: Consciousness and Personal Identity. Ed. Garrett, Aaron. The Routledge Companion to 18th Century Philosophy. Pages 245-264. 2014. Conclusion: Colonialism constructed through paradigms of racism required separation and difference, evident in modern psychology and psychiatry, and constructed descriptive conclusions, as in the DSM, on the nature of that difference. Locke postulated that differences were constructed on materialist aspects and true mental balance was gained through labour and ownership. American ownership of slaves, portrayed as the other, compounded the stability and individualism of slave owners. Being white, as evidenced by the American slave owner, came to mean being civilised and rational, being black wild and irrational. Psychology and psychiatry assumed these dialectics. 4 4