Delphic Maxim 33: Guard what is yours
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
33. Guard what is yours
When I first read this maxim, I imagined it would create a community of little Smaugs, sitting on top of their piles of gold, jealously guarding it from any intrusive and unwanted hobbits. Surely, given how virtuous Heroic society was, surely there wouldn’t be a maxim that compelled us to be possessive and greedy?
Or perhaps I am expressing values from my own time here. After all, we’ve had quite a few decades of celebrity culture and mass commercial capitalism, and a millennia of philosophy expanding on the notion of personal property before that — it may well be the case that my understanding of ‘what is mine’ is narrower and more commodified than that of the ancient Greeks.
What is ‘yours’? Could we read this as a community imperative? Guarding something might go beyond simply ‘denying access’. Maybe something was lost in translation, and actually this is a call to ‘protect’ what is yours? And perhaps the ‘yours’ is some communal call. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia spent upwards of sixty thousand years protecting the natural environment in Australia. This custodianship of country allowed a culture to exist in relative peace and harmony with the land that sustained them for all this time — there’s a lesson in there, and perhaps a way of reading today’s maxim.
Guardianship involves a sense of duty — just think of people who have responsibility as guardians of children. Or to borrow a (dated, obscure) pop-cultural example, think of Knuckles the Echidna from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Knuckles (whose culture, colleagues and biology are all lifted in varying degrees from Australia) is the Guardian of the Floating Island, and the Echidna culture is an advanced and philosophical civilisation stretching back beyond most civilised life on their planet. The duty that flows from guardianship is impressed on Knuckles from youth — it informs everything that he does.
Okay, I’ve invoked a comic book and a video game to make a point about ‘guarding what is yours’. Why would I struggle with this?
In part because I think the idea of a possessive, ‘propertied’ reading of this maxim contradicts the virtue of magnanimity and liberality. Any ethical code is of its time, and we live in an age of liberal property rights (developed through a long line of philosophers from Locke to Friedman and many more). This maxim is both easy to understand in a normal contemporary reading, but that shouldn’t be enough! Given everything we’ve read so far, we shouldn’t just stop at what seems like ‘common sense’ — common sense is so common.
How can a set of values from a past time and distant context give meaning to our lives today? Perhaps if we temper our greed and possessiveness with the virtues of generosity and liberality, and see the things we regard as ‘ours’ as part of a richer tapestry: community, identity, and the sense of life as involving more than things.
