A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

eproduced it throughout two millennia. The dual recognition is: we can
only live humanly in a society of human fellowship, and we can only live
if we draw the power, the substance, for such a life from something
else, something completely different from us humans that Is What It Is,
or “it is so by virtue of its own” 90 . This reaction of people alone is not a
sufficient guarantee for that. Morality cannot justify itself, otherwise it
will succumb to an abstract and empty moralism which is the equal opposite
of barbarism.
A different tradition, upon which the Declaration of Human Rights draws,
is that of modern European thought. It is rooted in the Old and New Testaments,
and in the Graeco-Roman history of civility and private property.
One of the points of departure of Judeo-Christian tradition is the claim
to domination over nature and the transfer of nature to the ownership
of humankind. As the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament states,
“God created man in his own image, said unto them, Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living
thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1, 28). Not living in and with
nature, but the use of nature is what is at the beginning. But this thought
is deeply contradictory: how can this claim to dominion be reconciled
with the preservation of creation? The unbridled power of people over
nature and against one another, and the will to freedom intrinsic in that,
will necessarily be transformed into antagonism against nature and
among people, unless strong counterforces rein it in.
To the extent that modern western bourgeois thought refers to the
founding mythology of the Old Testament, it faced the problem of how
the transfer of ownership of creation to humankind as a whole could be
reconciled with the exclusive property rights of individuals. Let me elucidate
this using the example of the work of John Locke, “An Essay
Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government”,
(1679-‘89). Locke took both natural law, such as it emerged in ancient
Rome, and the Christian “Revelation” as his points of departure. Natural
90 Chan Wing-Chuek, quoted in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziran.
136