Hobbs, Rousseau, a Spherical Cow
August 26. I’m back. You’re back. So, grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.
Why not ease our way back in with a simple question: What is the nature of humans, good or bad? The two people whose answers are cited most often are Thomas Hobbs and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
According to Hobbs, who had just witnessed the brutality of the English Civil War from 1642 to 1651, the natural condition of mankind is a state of war of all against all in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He used it to justify the establishment of states and the legitimacy of governments as holders of a monopoly on violence and the threat thereof. Much of his book Leviathan is occupied with the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.
Rousseau offered in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men in 1755 a contradiction of the claims made by Hobbs. Written for a prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, answering the prompt: “What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?”, but rejected because it came in a word or two above the word limit, Rousseau coined the phrase ‘noble savage’. Noble here should be read as aristocratic because, not unlike Hobbs, Rousseau had written his essay with the people of the Brave New World in mind – the First Nations. And the men of the First Nations did what the aristocrats did in Europe, mainly spending their time hunting. And some of Rousseau’s argument sound a bit like the indigenous critique on the Europe’s societies when he concludes that humans’ nature is good but then property happened.
I say his arguments sound a bit like the indigenous critique because they don’t catch the real meaning of it. The indigenous people of the newly discovered Americas, in particular the tribes around the Great Lakes in what is today Canada, practiced the concept of personal property. They just didn’t use it to explain the basis of any freedoms a person might exercise. But that’s another can of worms. One we don’t need to open now.
The problem with both today still prevalent ideas of the nature of humans – Hobbs is the basis for how politics and economy are practiced today while Rousseau comes up in question of humanitarian aid e.g. – is that neither of them has scientific proof. And the authors never claimed as much. Only later generation turned what started out as hypotheses and thought experiments into proven theorems on the basis of which they could defend Europe’s far worse societal outcomes against the indigenous critique and the myriad of eyewitness reports of the advantages of organizing human networks differently. And not just defend it, but force it on everyone else.
Ever since, the question is treated as if it has been settled, while it truly isn’t. Scientific proof today even speaks against both of the hypotheses. E.g. both assume that humans in prehistory lived alone or in very small groups covering little territory while we know today that they cooperated in huge networks that sometimes even spanned continents. Take the altar stone of Stonehenge that, as recent research has proven, has been carried over land from Scotland to the Salisbury Plains – 500 miles, at a time when the people of the British isles had tried agriculture but had given it up again in favor of foraging and had opted against central authority in perpetuity.
Meaning, not just some ideas in politics but the whole way we do politics today might be based on a wrong image of humans, and the troubles we experiences from the mental health crisis to populism to unrest and wars could be the product of just that – like a fighting dog bred for aggression that’s not in its nature, at least not in that way.
So, how about we approach it again and start out like physicist often do – with a spherical cow. The name of this philosophy comes from a joke which I think needs improving before it gets told one more time. But what it means is, we idealize a difficult problem down to a simple one by ignoring as many complications as we can. Once we got the answer to the simple problem, we put the complications back in and see how they affect the answer to the simple problem.
Funnily enough, when defining the simple problem of the natural state of humans, the main complication is our mind. Specifically, the way we only use a few data to create our own model of the world and self. Even more specifically, the creativity we use without ever thinking about it to fill in the blanks in order to create a coherent story. When it comes to looking at us as the research object, these stories we tell us will show up in our result like coming to terms with the English Civil War or explaining the Brave New World. So, the spherical cow of the natural state of humans would be a comparison of the specific setup of humans to the actual physical universe to figure out not least why we have a mind that can deal in hypotheticals. Not how but why? It would seem like there’s no ethics in that. But I think once we fathom the consequences for necessary human behavior given the laws of the physical universe according to which we came together we way we did, we will be able to make statements about ethics. And then, by adding the complication that the human mind is, work out how and again why the mind suggested us to move away from nature.
Let’s explore. Make a habit out of exploring. Make exploring the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
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