Taking Issue With Tom

In the 17^th century Thomas Hobbes, an Englishman, wrote about what many philosophers at the time (and since) have referred to as the “state of nature.” They were describing an earlier, pre-farming era, when humans lived without a government and with no laws or enforcement to keep people's so-called baser instincts in check. In 1651 Hobbes wrote, in his landmark book Leviathan, that in such living conditions, there would be no civilization like he and his cohorts enjoyed. He said that, without 17^th century benefits such as industry, buildings, higher education, arts, etc., that the life of humans in a state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

This belief that 17^th century trappings of civilization were necessary for people to be safe and enjoy life, was shared by most Western philosophers at the time... as well as since then (although many cannot imagine now living without their TV or the internet). This idea was the bedrock of what was termed the “social contract,” whereby the attainment of safety and peace depended on people agreeing to adhere to the social contract's stipulations—which described how people should treat each other and get along peacefully, or else the government would come down on them.

Hobbes maintained that our natural passions are fundamentally competitive and egoistic, and that the fear we have of each other plays a central role in requiring the social contract, because it provides a barrier against the state of war we'd otherwise revert to, without the contract. In fact, he even felt that society required a strong, coercive sovereign to maintain that control. A stable society requires a strongman to keep us in our place, he wrote.

I disagree with Hobbes. He was writing within the context of what we can now look back upon and perceive as a brutal 17^th century industrial England, in which the dominant class was enjoying its privileges primarily due to the mistreatment and misery of the poor, who labored under horrific conditions in England's factories to provide all the trappings of life for the well-to-do. From the perspective of that dark time, it's no wonder that Hobbes looked upon people as self-centered and immoral—and that they required the heavy hand of authority to control them.

Furthermore, he was not speaking from the point of view of the oppressed poor, but from the view of those who enjoyed the advantages of education, art, industry, and infrastructure. 17^th century England possessed the best of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, but only at the cost of keeping a large segment of its population in poverty and misery. In fact, Hobbes's lower-class general society lived a life that was indeed “nasty, brutish, and short.”

From Hobbes's outlook, one's property was supreme. The acquisition and holding of property brought about the belief that people necessarily lived in competition with each other, and often lusted after the neighbor's property. Thus, the philosophers and political thinkers of Europe at the time were also focused in individual rights; primarily on the importance of protecting one's property.

From that narrow perspective, Hobbes and his cohorts had little exposure to alternative cultures—cultures, for example, in which property was not supreme, individual rights were often secondary to one's community rights, and in which people had long lived in peaceful coexistence with one another... as well as with their environment. Had Hobbes traveled the globe and took the time to appreciate Earth's many indigenous cultures, he may have learned that many of these people—living in a true state of nature—did not have lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Ever since the “rise” of Europe and America, 300-400 years ago, Westerners have developed a very parochial point of view that considers Western civilization to be far more advanced than other cultures. It seems to me that Hobbes helped to lay the foundation for that hubristic attitude. If we open our minds to this bias, we can see that the state of nature, rather than having to be brutish, was often gentle and peaceful... especially when its citizens had yet to acquire the tendency to be competitive and egoistic.