What Owning Nothing is Like

A pre-famine portrait of Ireland

The population is more or less divided into two great parties. Those who want to get and those who want to keep.

-Alexis de Tocqueville

In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken wrote an essay originally titled, “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” He meant it to be about the sharing economy, but accidentally coined a phrase to represent the alleged aims of a global elite: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

Auken hadn’t meant people wouldn’t be able to own things. He just thought they wouldn’t care about owning things, forecasting:

In our city we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

While a co-working space in your living room might sound tyrannical, the free rent might be worth it. All the outrage about future generations not “owning” things is dated and prescient at the same time: around half of millennials own homes, but 40% of single-family rentals in the US will be owned by institutional investors by 2030. What does it mean to own something? What does it mean to own nothing? In renting, we lease our identities. Our homes become tidal and our values migratory.

Emmett Larkin’s infinitely readable collection, Alexis de Toqueville’s Journey in Ireland (1990), brings us to a time when the people who own everything decide the people who own nothing are not just their lessers, but strangers. The dangers of the unrelatability of these realities are shown in the Tocqueville’s notes and the Irish Potato Famine that followed. It all starts with what we believe.

Unity Unbound

In 1800, the Act of Union united Ireland and Britain. This led to the “emancipation” of the Catholic population across the United Kingdom. In Ireland, emancipation gave new freedoms for Catholics, who made up eighty percent of the population. They became free to practice their religion, hold public office and, if they had the right amount of property, vote. But it was hard to own land. By the 1830s, some 70% of Irish landowners, almost all of whom were Protestant, had inherited their land. When their serfs could suddenly vote for Catholic politicians, the landowners started to consolidate their land holdings and evict their tenants. The crops grown by their starving and suddenly homeless tenants were not eaten but exported.

Catholics in Ireland endured a grinding existence of subsistence living in a country owned by Protestants sympathetic with Britain and reliant on the English for security. These conditions led to the vulnerability of the population that resulted in the Irish Potato Famine, which lasted from 1845 to 1855 and resulted in the death of 1 million people and the migration of 2 million others. The country’s population plummeted by 25%. What engineered this scarcity? Was it cruelty? Malice? Apathy?

In 1835, ten years before the potato famine, French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, visited Ireland and, in surveying a population of eternal renters, found out.

Alexis and Gustave’s Excellent Adventure

Source: C-Span

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) arrived in Ireland in July 1835 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866). The two had spent nine months together in America in 1831 and 1832, thanks to a grant from the French government meant to fund research of the penal system. The products of their American pilgrimage would be Beaumont’s novel Marie, or Slavery in the United States (1835), a story of forbidden love between a young Frenchman and an American woman with African ancestry, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840), two volumes that still stand as the most impressive and enduring prophecies of the American democratic system and the American people.

In all his work, Tocqueville, an aristocrat whose great-grandfather was guillotined, writes endearingly of democracy but mourns the loss of an artistic and intellectual center that he believes is found within an aristocracy. As Larkin puts it in his introduction to Alexis de Toqueville’s Journey in Ireland:

The central concern of [Tocqueville’s] intellectual life since his visit to America [was] the great transition from an aristocratic to a democratic society.

Visiting Ireland on a government grant with the same pretense of observing the judicial system, Tocqueville and Beaumont embarked on a six-week journey that exposed them to oppression and poverty on a scale they hadn’t seen. Just ten days into the trip, Tocqueville wrote to his father:

You cannot imagine what a complexity of miseries five centuries of oppression, civil disorders, and religious hostility have piled up on poor people. It is a ghastly labyrinth, in which it would be difficult to try to find one’s way, and of which we shall only catch a glimpse of the entrance.

Ever conscious and ever neutral as a diplomat, Tocqueville identifies two parties: Protestants and Catholics. Without a separation of church and state like he had seen in America, he observes that religious beliefs become identities without intersection. As he explains in a letter to his cousin:

Each of these two parties wanted to get hold of us and make us see things through their spectacles. We acted like real Normans without ever saying either yes or no. They then stuffed us with letters of recommendation for the interior of the country and we left.

Alexis de Toqueville’s Journey in Ireland offers a striking series of Tocqueville’s notes on Ireland that illuminate the relationship between land, law, and humanity’s natural drive to divide and conquer. In an Ireland on the verge of collapse, we witness what happens when 80% of the population owns nothing but and, thanks to different beliefs, fundamentally become aliens to a global ownership class.

Atrophy of the Aristocracy

If you wish to know what the spirit of conquest, religious hatred, combined with all the abuses of aristocracy without any of its advantages, can produce, come to Ireland.

-Alexis de Tocqueville

What is the origin of culture? Of a country?

In America today, we can easily say that Taylor Swift is currently one of our largest cultural icons. Where she goes, she creates movements with all the same intensity as a Donald Trump rally. The millionaires and billionaires with a voice and persona televised and distributed to millions of households are our current nobility and, for better or worse, they lead by example. We select the icons that speak to us and our attention becomes our intention. The celebrities of culture are our modern nobility and people pay a premium to follow them, creating an ecosystem. As Billboard reports:

When Swift touched down in Cincinnati on June 30 and July 1, the surge of Swifties brought more than $2.6 million into downtown hotels, as well as $5.3 million to hotels in the surrounding area.

Swift is a noble and she has created a class of imitators seeking to find themselves in her style, her words, her beliefs, her music, her actions. This pattern is as old as time. Tocqueville believed nobles should set an example for the lower classes to imitate and, incidentally, the lower classes would refine and define their lives through imitation. In Tocqueville’s time, he believed a worship of nobles and their habits was the only way for a peaceful transition to democracy. He believed that nobility nurtures nations and nobles must feel like they are part of the same country in order to allow a people to grow free in sympathy. As he explains:

Fancy an aristocracy that has the same language, the same manners, the same religion as the people; that is at the head, but not above, the understanding of the people; that exceed them in everything a little.

Tocqueville theorized that the “head” of the nation, the elites, would help everyone transcend:

Conceive of a middle class, rising gradually in importance in the midst of this state of things, succeeding by degrees to share the power and shortly after all the privilege of the ancient aristocracy, in such a way… which everybody can hope to obtain, gradually replaces birth.

In Ireland, he found a headless nation, an Irish aristocracy both absent and apathetic:

The nobleman, on his side, stripped of all that stimulates man to great and generous action, slumbers in an unenlightened egoism.

The divide begins with belief. The Protestant nobility, some twenty percent of the population, felt free to disregard the mass suffering of the Catholic majority. They lived in a different world and could not identify with them. There is something unsaid in Tocqueville’s observations: noble or commoner, Ireland had become a country dissolving in defeat. The apathy of the aristocracy was likely because the country itself had fallen and they were little more than gardeners of their own shrinking pastures of purpose.

Yet in this isolation, the nobility of nineteenth century Ireland failed to generate a new industry that could benefit everyone. A lack of industrial innovation in Ireland, in part due to the shadow of England in every operation, led to a stagnation of spirit among the elite. Tocqueville notes:

Wishing to imitate the English aristocracy without having its manly spirit and, without knowing how, like it, to draw on the freedom and ease of the lower classes as a new sources of wealth… There is no manufacturing, no industry, the people have only the land to live off, and, as they are accustomed at all times to live on the least that a man can subsist on, when a man has no land he really faces death. That is why implacable hatred and numberless acts of violence are born of evictions.

Smoke and starvation filled the homes. In a letter to his cousin, Tocqueville writes that it would be impossible for someone to picture the “misery of the population.” There’s one bright spot: pigs. As he observes:

What shocked me most in the beginning was to find a pig settled in the middle of the household. I infinitely respect pigs, but I cannot believe that Providence’s view has been to make them the habitual companions of men…. the Irish pig lends himself to the innocent games of the family of his host with a perfect charm. It is not rare to see the children of the house hanging on his tail. Far from becoming indignant with them, he gives evidence of his satisfaction by grunts full of gentleness: it is a charming spectacle, a very touching picture of rustic happiness.

Tenant Tension

In interviewing Thomas Kelly, a minister of the Anglican Church, Tocqueville asks why there are so many landless people in a country where one had no choice but to live off the land. As Kelly explains:

“Since the change in the electoral laws and the Emancipation Bill the landlords have busied themselves destroying the many small farms and consolidating them into larger ones…

There is no moral tie between the poor and the rich. The difference of political opinion and religious belief, of race, [and in] the standard of living, render them strangers, one could almost say enemies. The rich Irish landlords extract from their estates all that they can yield. They profit by the competition created by the poverty, and when they have thus amassed immense sums of money, they go to spend them abroad…. The Irishman raises beautiful crops, carries his harvest to the nearest post, puts it on board an English vessel, and returns home to subsist on potatoes.”

Exporting everything to foreign buyers, the one import from England that seems to have engineered the doom of Ireland is a new dignity for Catholics. In a new freedom came a new suffering. As another bishop explains:

“As long as the upper classes saw the Catholics as slaves, submitting to their fate with resignation, they did not treat them violently. But since political rights have been granted to the Catholic population, and they wish to exercise them, they persecute them as much as they can and seek to root them out of their lands in order to put Protestant farmers in their place.”

Catholic priests became spiritual guides with the promise of a better tomorrow, a hope that became political. The generosity of the impoverished is as striking to Tocqueville as the avarice of the estate owners. As he writes:

In order to give alms, the farmer will spare the manure for his field, he will wear rags, his wife will sleep on straw, and his children will not go to school. What does the lord do during all this time? He scrolls in his vast estate surrounded by great walls. In the enclosure of his park, everything breathes splendor, outside poverty groans, but he does not notice it.

Was there any chance of reconciliation? Of humanization? Couldn’t a more favorable relationship with Protestants lead to a new understanding? One priest tells Tocqueville that any association with the aristocracy would remove all the credibility he had established with the people. “It is in the people, Sir,” he tells Tocqueville, “that the root of beliefs is found.”

The histories of oppression had built two worlds in one country. The Protestants and Catholics had become alien to one another. At the end of his journey, Tocqueville concludes this wound can never be healed. Unable to relate to the lower classes, the upper classes had already resorted to removal. The Irish Potato Famine, triggered by a a blight ten years after Tocqueville’s visit, only exposed just how fragile the system had become.

Owning the Future

It wasn’t, necessarily, the evictions and tenant migrations that caused the Irish Potato Famine. In scientific papers, we are told that the cause was Phytophthora infestans, a plant pathogen that infected potatoes in Ireland, is what destroyed the crops across the country. But Alexis de Toqueville’s Journey in Ireland shows just how close to collapse the structure had already become.

What we see in Tocqueville’s observations is what happens when a society has no truly singular belief in a country’s future and when the nobility of a country have nothing in common with the majority of the country. In a post-ownership society, it is the beliefs we share that create the land we share. The question left hanging, then, is what does anyone, despite every other circumstance, believe along with us? And is that enough to believe in a future we can create together?