John Piper and the Parable of the Sex Trafficker

"God in eternity looked upon me foreseeing my fallenness, my pride, my sin and said, ‘I want that man in my family! I will pay for him to be in my family with my son’s life.’ That’s love folks, that is mega-off the charts love!" — John Piper

If the above comment is abstracted from its context, it is a wonderful quote. I could gleefully digest it as a Roman Catholic. In the concrete totality of Piper's theology, it is a cruel monstrosity. It is a mockery of Christian theology and the notion of Love. In fact, I should think it were the cruel joke of Satan whispering into the ears of the faithful, ridiculing their faith in God. 

In order to demonstrate the sadism of John Piper and his blasphemous joke, I wish to tell a parable about sex trafficking. 

A picture of actress Jamie Chung in the 2012 film, Eden, portraying a Korean-American girl abducted by sex traffickers.

In a small town in Vietnam, there was a foreign man named Godot. One night, as Godot was walking through a slum littered with brothels, his heart was moved with compassion towards the girls he found having unspeakable acts performed upon their bodies. The man screamed to the heavens, "I want those girls to be free! And I will pay for their freedom with all my worldly possessions." The man burst in through one of the doors and announced that he is willing to pay for the bodies of all these kidnapped girls to do with as he pleases. Few questions asked, the traffickers handed over the lot of the girls to Godot. 

The foreign man took the girls to the prosperous city, and payed for their housing, food, clothing and for their education, so that in a certain years time they will be able to find gainful employment. At the end of the week, once he had gotten the girls settled in to their new life, he packed his bags and began to exist the compound. One of the girls he had rescued, Ai, latched onto his leg, kneeling in the dirt, and said, "Oh kind man, who are you that you could have sold all your worldly possessions to save the lot of us who were dying in our misery?" 

Godot turned on his heal to face Ai and brought his eyes down to meet hers that were looking up at him. "Why, my dear," he said with a kind expression on his visage, "I am the sex trafficker who was in charge of bringing all those girls to the network of brothels you were also brought to. I am off to a rural village in south to bring more girls to that terrible place. And after that I am heading to an interview in New York City with Nicholas Kristof to tell the story of how I rescues all of you, for the praise and glory of my name." 

With that Godot walked off to continue his job. 

The reason Jesus spoke in parables was because the narrative format has a peculiar power to reach the core of our being and influence our spirit. It allows us to understand at the level of the intellect and the heart simultaneously. Godot in my parable takes the place of God in the Calvinism of John Piper. In the deterministic world of Piper, God is the one who sells us into slavery and then expects a grateful reaction from the slaves, and the others, when he chooses to save a small portion of them, leaving the rest to rot in their misery. How could this monstrous theology be conceived of any less than a cruel joke?

Prostitutes, Liberals and the Satanic Mills

The liberal justification for the legalization of prostitution has been swirling around in my head this past month.^† I had done some research as an undergrad exploring the topic. I enjoy readings on the institutions of prostitution and sex trafficking, such as Melissa Farley and Kathryn Farr. I find it fascinating, since it boggles me on the level of the heart how anybody could be supportive of prostitution, viewing it as a positive social institution, or even as a tolerable social phenomenon. And at the same time, on a philosophical level, I perfectly understand the justifications made for the prostitution phenomenon — even if I disagree with their validity.  

What I want to draw attention to in today's post is the similarity in the philosophic discourse used to justify prostitution and that used to justify the exploitation* of the working class during the Industrial and Progressive eras. The idea came to me while reading Marx's chapter on the working day in Capital Vol. I. Marx dedicated about 100 pages to a prolonged discussion of the fight to reduce the length of the working day in 19th century England. A particular section caught my eye where the capitalist class made the argument that workers should not be limited in the number of hours they can work if they want to improve their lot. In other words, why should not somebody be able to work extra hours in order to earn more income for themselves and their families? Or, why should somebody not be able to work in a toxic factory environment if it earns them extra income? It might be more financially beneficial than working the family farm. 

The Satanic Mills of the Industrial-Age.

I have found a parallel discourse among modern liberals who seek to vindicate prostitution as a legitimate profession. Even if many of those in prostitution have psychological traumas (particularly a history of sexual abuse), who are we to tell them they should not be able to make needed money by selling their sexual body to another person? Sometimes the most economic decision for a girl from a third-world country, who is pretty and has very little education, is to sell her sexual body for money to improve her lot and perhaps the lot of her family. It might be more financially beneficial than working in a rice patty. 

On the face of it, prima facie, this liberal logic appears reasonable. Even if we view this as an evil, prostitution appears to be, sometimes, the lesser of two evils. And yet, it still leaves a horrible aftertaste on the tongue when the words themselves have been spoken in justification. The fault of this thinking is that it does nothing to challenge the systems of oppression in our world, but rather tacitly supports them and gives them validity. It is the last sigh of a politics that has surrendered to monstrosity.

Without working day legislation—based on the hours and conditions of labor—that limit the arbitrary freedom of workers to sell their labor power to the capitalist factories, we surrender to the system of inhumanity. Some workers may make less money for their families if we limit the length of the working day. Requiring companies to pay for the healthcare of employees may cause capitalists not to hire as many workers, or lay off some workers, than they would before the legislation. Yet, I am not convinced that is a valid reason not to pass said legislation, since the alternative is merely to give capital whatever it wants without struggle. It is to wave the white flag. And, historically, it is not what liberals have done. The progressive movements, in the first half of the 20th century, fought virulently for humane working conditions.

From what I understand, this is a real picture of a British prostitute working her territory.

I am not trying to find commonality with the liberal who thinks that sex work is a social positive, and who glorifies the social institution.^‡ I am trying to draw a parallel between the sex work and industrial-age factory work for the liberal-minded who already believes there is something disordered in prostitution. It is the point that the legalization of prostitution comes from a libertarian ideology, where the free market is the idol, rather than the same progressive spirit that sought to place many restrictions on factory owners and factory labor.

A progressive spirit of liberalism should not glorify the institution of prostitution, based on the same logic used in the struggle for the working day. It should work against its proliferation, for if prostitution is seen as an exploitative form of work,  then the next logical step is to work to eliminate it, just as the progressive movement abolished child labor from the factory system. The ideology which seeks to legalize prostitution possess more genetic similarity to libertarianism than with the spirit of the progressive labor movement. The logic contemporary liberals purport, for the legalization of prostitution, is the same logic capitalists used during the progressive era to justify the exploitation of labor.

Notes:
† I am using the word "liberal," here, in terms of social (modern) liberalism. It is the brand of liberalism that has moved beyond classical liberalism and has incorporated social protections against the unbound logic of the capitalist market. 
* The word "exploitation" should be read in a general sense, here in this post, and not in technical Marxian sense. 
‡ Kari Kesler writes in Sexualities: "I believe that some prostitutes, the ones who exercise control and autonomy in their lives and who have both freely chosen and enjoy their work, can be held up as role models."

Cafeteria Catholicism or Loyalist Dissent?

The name "cafeteria catholic" is commonly thrown, by staunch Vatican party-member Catholics, at those of us who remain united with the Roman Catholic Church, but do not doctrinally follow each and every pronouncement of the Magisterium. The adjective "cafeteria" is a belittling and symbolically violent word which tries to trivialize the faith of Catholics, such as myself, who break with the Magisterium on some doctrinal issues. 

"Cafeteria catholicism" implies that the faith and intellectualism of dissenting Catholics is based upon the crass notion of consumerism. Our faith is implied to be one where we shop for what happens to tempt our palate at the moment. In the cafeteria, if we do not like a food (for any whimsical reason) we move on and choose some other food that appears more appealing. The implication is that those of us who dissent from the Vatican party-line are just as arbitrary and capricious in our religion and faith as in the cafeteria searching for something to eat. When a doctrine that the Magisterium has proclaimed does not suit our desire, we simply move on to something else, choosing another notion that better suits our appetite.

The charge of "cafeteria catholicism" glosses over the reality that many of those of us who break with the Magisterium do not do so wantonly or blindly, but that we have very firm reasons from within the tradition. In other words, those of us who consider ourselves loyal dissidents, often dissent precisely for the sake of the tradition. The tradition (auto)deconstructs itself and pushes beyond the limits it has set for itself.

Jacques Derrida insisted that deconstruction is always auto-deconstruction. In other words, deconstruction is an internal process that works from within the discourse under analysis, not an external violence that bastardizes the text. It is the subject/object's own movement which is the process of deconstruction. 

Let me provide a lucent example. In the early centuries of Christian history, the value of sexuality was highly suspect and virulently denounced by giants of the Church. St. Augustine developed the notion, in his theology, that human beings are born into sin, because we are born from a sex act. The sex act is a necessary sin for the propagation of the human race. Pope Gregory the Great proclaimed that the pleasure derived from sexual acts was itself inherently sinful, assenting with the Augustinian theology, and citing as his proof Psalm 51:5, "Behold I was conceived in sins, and in delights my mother bore me." Pope Gregory commanded husbands or wives who had engaged in lawful, marital sexual relations to "abstain (from entering the church at once)."

With the coming of Vatican II, the Roman Church began to adopt a more positive, romantic view of sexual relations (at least as far as marriage is concerned). It could no longer be maintained that sexuality, created by God as a part of our human nature, was wholly aberrant to goodness. The council of Cardinals and advisors at Vatican II reformed the notion of sexuality to place it more in line with what they believed the whole breadth of the Roman tradition demanded—a stark reversal of previous sexual ethics, but one that was true to the spirit of the faith.

A loyalist dissident, such as myself, believes that this is how we are proceeding when we criticize the Vatican's theology of the body, as it applies to contraceptives, homosexuality and pre-marital sex. We believe with firm conviction that we are carrying the insights and spirit of Vatican II forward to its logical conclusions. We criticize the procreationist view of the sex act, because it does violence to the notions of love and intimacy that Vatican II elevated as the blessings of marriage.

And it is for this very reason that we stay Roman Catholic. Protestants and party-member Catholics commonly ask me why I remain Roman if I do not believe everything the "Church" teaches. The previous paragraphs provide the perfect answer: because I believe I am carrying forward the banner of the Spirit of God further within, not outside, the tradition that Christ has bequeathed to us.

Psychopathic Christian Beliefs (part ii)

I wish to adopt the phrase pathos of distance from Friedrich Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morals. The concept Nietzsche had in mind is not important for my purpose and my use of it bears no actual relation to his notion. For those who have never heard the term used before, pathos/πάθος is an old Greek word meaning "suffering". It carries the connotation of an emotional empathy. It specifically refers to the suffering one feels when s/he internalizes the pain of another being.

Since in the pervious post, I have already said that I believe Christians who hold these psychopathic beliefs are generally decent peoples, the most plausible explanation for the existence of psychopathic Christian beliefs in the modern world appears to be that there a pathos of distance at work.

I am not sure this jaguar is displaying the right sort of apathy — it seems more like s/he is just lazy — but it is quite adorable, and I simply had to add it to this blog post.

Let me provide a few example to explain what is meant by pathos of distance in this context. I was on a train today with a professor I knew from my undergraduate days, and he told me that people are not as kind and considerate online as they generally are in person. He said that people hide behind a computer screen and say things they would never say to another human being, face-to-face. The youth in our culture intuitively understand this. It is common knowledge. Some people are "trolls" online, and merely use the internet to prank and aggravate others. There is an emotional-empathetic distance within an online interaction. It is not an immediate human interaction, but that interaction is mediated by the computer technology. There is a distance of emotion between sender and receiver.

Another example comes from recent news in which a new book claims President Obama repomarked in the context of drone strikes that he is really good at killing people. I am not sure if the story is true or erroneous, but that is besides the point. It is so effortless for President Obama to give the order for soldiers sitting in flight-control simulators in the United States to pull a trigger and blow apart a Pakistani or Afghan village. How different such a situation is from taking a firearm or a broadsword and slaughtering every human being in the village. Squeezing a red trigger from a comfy seat staring at monitor is comparable to hearing the cries of frightened men, women and children, having the stench of corpses flood your sense of smell, and witnessing the sight of blood scattered everywhere as you fire bullets into and hack apart other human beings.

It is my thesis that in much the same way that Americans can gleefully support drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan and consign to death unknown men, women and children without being terrible human beings in their daily lives, Christians are able to faithfully justify the "historical" genocides and executions recorded in the Jewish Tenakh. The Christian does not need to actually throw the first stone to execute the poor girl who is considered a criminal and reprobate for engaging in premarital sex. S/he does not have to look into the frightened face of some young teenager and brutally kill her.

The idea of hell does not have to be intimately experienced by the Christian. The Christian does not need to experience a πάθος of their non-Christian friends and family being tortured under Dante's Inferno. There exists a pathos of distance between the belief in hell and the human experiences of the common Christian believer. It is a distant phantasy, not an experienced reality. It is through this pathos of distance that human beings are able to maintain a schizophrenic psychology. President Obama can glibly remark that he is effective at killing people and Christians can justify genocide, abhorrent legal systems and the inhumanity of hell.

The last part to this three part post looks at psychopathic Christian beliefs will seek to answer why these monstrous beliefs remain a part of contemporary religious thought, if they no longer stem from conscious, aggressive wishes. 

Psychopathic Christian Beliefs (part i)

It has become self-evident that Christians historically and contemporarily have belief-sets that are blatantly psychopathic. And by this word I do not intend a slur, but rather the technical sense of the word, in which one does not demonstrate the proper human emotions, but rather remains cold and apathetic, inhuman.

It becomes necessary to define exactly what I am not including under my label of psychopathic. I do not mean to refer to a sense of exuberance the believer feels at something like the fate of the wicked, burning for all eternity in hellfire. Such joy and happiness felt at the sufferings of others is deeply human — history stands a testament to that. Norbert Elias recounts that during the Middle Ages, townsfolk would often take great pleasure in the torture of cats, as public amusement. We are a people given over to violence, hatred and death. There is no doubt that such beliefs are monstrous, but humanity itself is monstrous.

"At that greatest of all spectacles, that last and eternal judgment how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then ever before from applause." — Tertullian

"However there are other spectacles—that last eternal day of judgment, ignored by nations, derided by them, when the accumulation of the years and all the many things which they produced will be burned in a single fire. What a broad spectacle then appears! How I will be lost in admiration! How I will laugh! How I will rejoice! I will be full of exaltation then as I see so many great kings who by public report were accepted into heaven groaning in the deepest darkness with Jove himself and alongside those very men who testified on their behalf!" — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

I do not want to discuss the demonic Christian portrayed above (quite the oxymoron), but rather the well-meaning Christian who remains apathetic to the horror and suffering espoused by these monstrous theologies.

The first case I want to draw attention to is the Christian justification of genocide in the Old Testament. The classic passage is I Samuel XV:ii-iii: "Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish what Am′alek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Am′alek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’” Contemporary Christians will balk at the idea of slaughtering civilian populations, and castigate Muslims for suicide bombings and the like. Yet, Christians will justify the past-historic genocide of innocent, men, women and children. Platitudes will be given about how all human beings are deserving of death, and such; none of which are very convincing.

This wicked sketch belongs to Pechan at DeviantArt.

The second case I want to bring under our gaze is constituted by the barbaric laws of the Old Covenant for the ancient Hebrews. So for example we find the words written in the Tanach: "But if the thing is true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you." Once again, Christians balk at the monstrosity of Muslims in the Middle East administering such "justice" on women, but adamantly defend the righteousness of the Laws of Moses. No Christian in their right mind, living in the Western world, would think it just for the Government to kill females who have had pre-marital sex. A great discrepancy exists as in the previous example.

The last case is the nonchalance with which Christians condemn non-Christians to hell and declare it an act of justice. Many honest, well-meaning people, actually believe that well-meaning non-Christians deserve to burn in hell for all eternity, merely because they did not believe the same things about God. These Christians walk amongst the hell-bound every day, give them a warm "hello" and call many of these people their friends. As in the previous two instances, something appears to be amiss here. The theology does not appear to match behavior or (moral) emotions.

This post merely intended to lay the groundwork. The next post will flesh out the notion of psychopathic theology, which has become the hallmark of contemporary Christianity.

The Apocalypse of Esther

So, I have recently finished reading the Book of Esther in my Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition of the biblical books — a translation I highly commend. The narrative has a similarity to both the Book of Judith which precedes it and to the Book of Nehemiah in both of which the Jewish people are on the precipice of genocidal ethnical cleansing by their adversaries. The Book of Judith is very similar in that it also features a brave, female heroine who prevents the apocalyptic destruction of the Hebrew people.

I want to draw the readers attention to the apocalyptic imagery contained in the deuterocanonical parts of the Book of Esther — included in the Roman Catholic canon, but not in the Protestant or Judaic canons. For Roman Catholics, the book opens with the apocalyptic-divine Dream of Mor'decai, the guardian of the young Esther, that reads:

"And this was his dream: Behold, noise and confusion, thunders and earthquake, tumult upon the earth! And behold, two great dragons came forward, both ready to fight, and they roared terribly. And at their roaring every nation prepared for war, to fight against the nation of the righteous. And behold, a day of darkness and gloom, tribulation and distress, affliction and great tumult upon the earth! And the whole righteous nation was troubled; they feared the evils that threatened them, and were ready to perish. Then they cried to God; and from their cry, as though from a tiny spring there came a great river, with abundant water; light came, and the sun rose, and the lowly were exalted and consumed those held in honor." (Esther XI:iv-xi RSV:CE).

I could not find a Christian painting of Mor'decai's Dream, so I chose this image to set the mood. I think it fits, as the dragon-imagery was the most striking feature of the dream that also creates a welcome parallel with the Book of Revelation. 

I do not wish to ramble on and on in analyzing the Dream of Mor'decai, but the crucial point I want to draw from this narrative is its similarity to the apocalyptic imagery found in the Gospels. A futurist interpretation of the apocalypse runs into a great number of absurdities and inconsistencies with the character of God revealed in the person of Christ. So I read Mor'decai's Dream as the perfect allusion for preterist/idealists to draw.

Futurists interpret the sayings of apocalyptic destruction in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation quite literally. So for instance, in Matthew XIV:vii-viii we find the passage, "For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of sufferings." I was listening to John MacArthur preach about the apocalypse on the radio the other day, and he definitely understands these words of Christ in a literal fashion. There will be earthquakes literatim, letter-for-letter.

The Dream of Mor'decai provides us with a biblical map for reading apocalyptic literature, and gives us a biblical justification for deciphering apocalyptic passages from a non-futurist perspective. In the Book of Esther we find a prophecy of dragons, earthquakes and war of the whole earth against the Hebrew people. It is the equivalent of the devastating, End of Days passages we find in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. Towards the very end of the book, Mor'decai acts as his own cipher and tells us, in hindsight, that the apocalyptic dream was the truth of all the events that unfolded in the whole of the book:

"For I remember the dream that I had concerning these matters, and none of them has failed to be fulfilled. The tiny spring which became a river, and there was light and the sun and abundant water — the river is Esther, whom the king married and made queen. The two dragons are Haman and myself. The nations are those that gathered to destroy the name of the Jews. And my nation, this is Israel, who cried out to God and were saved" (Esther X:v-ix).

There were no actual earthquakes to be found in the narrative of Esther, there were no mythical dragons and there was no world war. The Dream of Mor'decai was a hyperbolic-imaginative allegory of material-human events. The earthquakes do not represent the vibration of tectonic plates, but rather the fear, danger and disorder that the Israelites faced under the genocidal machinations of Haman. The dragons are not winged-beasts, but the titanic personalities of Mor'decai and Haman. The world is deployed as a metonymy for the nations of the Persian empire.

If nothing else, the apocalyptic elements of the Book of Esther should give us pause when reading the Book of Revelation and the End of Days portions of the Gospels. We should not be so swift to interpret their words in a literal manner. St. John's visions of dragons, earthquakes and a world war against Zion might very well be imaginative, hyperbolic descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. When viewed in light of Mor'decai's apocalypse, it no longer appears unlikely.

Aristotle's Critique of Common Property

Within the circle of political philosophy, the Aristotelian critique of common property is well-known. It is not all that different from the modern, commonsense criticism of socialism today. What Aristotle said in Book II of his Politics (πολιτικά) is that, "If they do not share equally enjoyments and toils, those who labor much and get little will necessarily complain of those who labor little and receive or consume much." Aristotle continued in the next paragraph, "[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business." Translating this in the contemporary vernacular, Aristotle was writing about the problems of collective action — he merely did so in an ancient, non-quantitative sort of manner.

This photograph is credited to xuniap Aristotle from DeviantArt.

Yet, I do not want to discuss the problems of collective action here. I want to zero in on another critique of common property, within the Politics, that has fallen by the wayside in recent times. And this was Aristotle's criticism from the vantage point of virtue ethics. In my humble opinion, this is probably the better argument — coming from someone who holds high regard for the virtue ethics tradition. Aristotle stated:

"And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property... No one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use of which is made of property." (Politics, Bk. II).

It should be noted that Aristotle drew a distinction between three forms of ancient communism — I ask you to forgive my anachronistic, Marxian-flavored language in advance. In the first, the means of production are commonly owned, but the products themselves are apportioned for private use. In the second, the means of production are privately owned, but the appropriation of those products is common. The last possibility is an economic system wherein both the production and appropriation of the products is common, from beginning to end. It appears that Aristotle's virtue-ethics criticism only applies to the last two forms of common ownership.

The logic of his thesis proceeds thusly: it is a human virtue for people to be beneficent, and therefore, it is moral for people to act with liberality. By having all the products of labor communally owned, it removes one of the virtues which is crucial for human beings to be properly moral. In other words, it is in some sense virtuous and moral for one to shower his or her friends and family with gifts and benefits, from his or her bounty. It makes one virtuous to be giving. Yet we cannot be giving if we have nothing to give. Such does not necessarily mean that one has to be wealthy in order to have this virtue. Even Christ says that the widow is virtuous beyond all the Pharisees because she gave the last two mites that she had — an ethic of proportionality. Though the point remains, she could not have done such an act, had she not had the private possession of those last two coins.

Contemporary communists tend to hold a mixed conception of the first and third kinds of communal ownership. So at least to a certain extent, I imagine that communism and the personal ownership of non-productive assets are compatible (certain products such as mass transit and parks will be consumed commonly, as is the case with public goods in capitalism). As I said above, Aristotle's critique is only applicable to the second and third forms of communism. For the sake of argument, I want to push the logic of communal ownership of finished products and reason whether there is the possibility for liberality in that schema.

This artwork is credited to ivangod from DevaintArt.

It is my proposal that liberality should still exist within the sphere of production itself. There are two ways to give charity: (i.) you donate your money and/or your resources; or, (ii.) you donate your time, your labor. The second and third kinds of common ownership would not allow us to be charitable by the first method. However, there is nothing in common appropriation preventing charity/liberality through the second method. Just as people nowadays donate their time to working in hospitals and at animals shelters, those under communism would show their liberality by the same token — and this is the crux of this post.

To show liberality towards friends, or the community as a whole, one could cook a special meal or work extra hard in constructing a desperately needed home. In truth, we tend to ascribe virtue to those who donate their labor rather than their wealth. A rich woman may donate millions of dollars to charity, and from a utilitarian perspective help many more people with her largesse, but we ascribe the greater virtue to the woman who spends a summer in Haiti reconstructing homes after a devastating earthquake. Again, the logic is comparable to Christ's parable of the widow's two mites.

I should like to conclude very briefly that Aristotle did not believe in the modern-liberal notion of inviolable, private property rights. The community always has an interest in private affairs, and must insure that the common good is being secured. Aristotle thus wrote:

"[S]ince we advocate not common ownership of land, as some have done, but community in it brought about in a friendly way by the use of it, and we hold that no citizen should be ill supplied with the means of subsistence. As to common meals, all agree that this is an institution advantageous for well-organized states to possess; our own reasons for sharing this view we will state later" (Politics, Bk. VII).

Therefore, Aristotle's critique of common appropriation should never be mistaken for a defense of the liberal notion of private property. Aristotle even declared that private property should be shared with one's friends and that travelers should have access to the use of private resources. In a word, private property is contingent on other-regarding behavior. The exclusionary-egotism of liberal private property revolts against the whole of Aristotelian philosophy.