Thomas Hobbs, Redux and Then Some
Posted on 01 January 2010
I wanted to post the below response on my website for many reasons which I believe will become clear as one reads. First, it’s one more example of how the Web brings people together who would probably have never reconnected post childhood, a quite wonderful and revolutionary turn of events for us humans.
Secondly, it addresses questions I began to play with before I was (more or less) overwhelmed by the Holidays. It regards my musings on Thomas Hobbs. (If you want to be reminded, see my blogs for December 11th and the 9th , which I have also reposted below this response)
Hopefully others will add to this because I think this begins to address the reasons I started this whole website with the question (completely un-thought out at the time, by the way) of “What’s the point?”
Here goes…
Hello Stephen,
I’m writing in response to your post of December 11 (“Another Question”) and will try to turn your premise on its head. Before doing that, let me introduce myself. After a career as a tropical botanist, I am now a lawyer who primarily represents nonprofits, and, as of this coming March, will have been married for 25 years to Charlotte Gyllenhaal (Note: this is my first cousin who I haven’t spoken to in so many years it would be hard to try to calculate – SG). Your post was brought to my attention by Herman Gyllenhaal (Note: a regular contributor here – SG), who sent me a link to it in an email a couple of days ago.
This particular post, as well as your previous one (“Question”), interested me very much, because I have long been interested in exploring the effect of civilization on human life, going back to my reading, more than 30 years ago, of Lewis Mumford’s two volume work, “The Myth of the Machine,” which consists essentially of an indictment of civilization as a detrimental factor on human society.
My view, as it has developed over the years, is quite the opposite of that of Hobbes. There is much evidence that human lives in a state of nature (i.e., prior to civilization) were anything but the classic Hobbesian “nasty, brutish and short.”
Rather, as argued by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (see, e.g., his “Stone-Age Economics” or his article “The Original Affluent Society,” available here: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html) (as an irrelevant but interesting aside, Marshall’s brother, Bernie Sahlins, was a founder of the Second City improv group in Chicago), they enjoyed much richer cultural, religious, and mental lives than we in civilization have been willing to recognize, and a mental life that is qualitatively different.
As many others have demonstrated (see, e.g., Neil Evernden, “The Natural Alien”), one of the primary effects of civilization on the human psyche has been to greatly reduce the breadth, richness and variety of people’s mental lives and to cause an objectification of others (as opposed to a subjective view of others, both human and nonhuman that is prevalent in indigenous cultures).
Objectification of others leads inevitably to an instrumental view of other humans and of nature itself, which in turn is a necessary pre-condition for so many of the ills brought by civilization — slavery, wage labor, class division, treatment of plants, animals and the earth as merely “resources” for human use (and the consequent despoliation of the environment) rather than as fellow creatures equally involved in the complex life of the planet and possessing their own rights to existence and autonomy, vicious military conquest, widespread official violence, repression (all conditions that you alluded to in your April Huffington Post comments on Bernie Madoff).
It’s hard to escape from the conclusion that these horrors are inevitable in a system (civilization) that has its origins in agriculture, which leads to settled communities and therefore social stratification, the exercise of power by those on top over all the rest (because of the need for labor), the need for ever-expanding land for food and resources (and consequently the forced conquest and assimilation of ever more distant groups of indigenous peoples), none of which is a part of the hundreds of thousands of years of authentic human existence prior to agriculture.
Some have expressed the view that madness is the common condition of civilized humans, whereas a healthy and authentic human psyche is prevalent among pre-civilized peoples. See, e.g., Paul Shepard (“Nature and Madness” and other works), Chellis Glendinning (“My Name is Chellis Glendinning and I Am in Recovery from Western Civilization”) among others.
I find that these views are consistent with, and develop out of, my strongly left political views, though they are different, and I am aware that many on the left would have difficulty with them (partly because of their implication that the re-establishment of a truly authentic human existence involves far more than just the abolishment of capitalism and would encroach on some of the left’s sacred cows).
I can hardly do justice to hundreds and thousands of pages of analysis in these few sentences, but I merely wanted to put on record that there is another view than the Hobbesian one, one that is well supported and that has a large and significant literature. Though this view has been either very rare or suppressed during most of the course of civilization, it has become much more prominent in the last hundred years or so, perhaps because as western civilization (or at least industrial civilization) rushes headlong to its fall (whether because of peak oil, the rapid depletion of other resources and the wholesale destruction of the environment, overpopulation or whatever other reason), its ills are now much more obvious.
Perhaps the most comprehensive and very recent statement of this view is by Derrick Jensen in “The Culture of Make Believe,” a beautifully written and extremely thorough exploration of all that civilization has wrought intertwined with a painstaking development of how civilization works its ill effects on the human mind (followed by his further development in the 2-volume “Endgame”).
These are just a few jottings that I have no illusion are sufficient in themselves to make a case, if one needs to be made, but maybe they are suggestive, and besides, I just couldn’t help following up on your musings about Hobbes.
All the best,
Michael Huft
(THANK YOU, MICHAEL)
Below – the two Posts re Hobbs:
Question
Posted on 9 December 2009
In the 17th Century Thomas Hobbs argued in Leviathan for a dominant sovereign power, which might manage man’s natural tendencies towards “contention, enmity and war.”
“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Is he correct? Are we humans essentially destructive and therefore need a strong hand? Are our essential instincts – like children – needing to be tamed like the jungle? What has been the consequence of this? What has been the consequence of cultivating all our jungles?
The other thought, the opposite position, would be that human beings are essentially good, that if we reach into the core of what it is to be human we will find goodness. Has this been proven in any way?
I am coming to believe that Hobb’s core thought – it could also be repackaged (or previously packaged) as belief in Original Sin and (as Freud played around with it – the death instinct) that these two thoughts really matter.
And, if they do, which thought/concept is correct?
Another Question
Posted on 11 December 2009
Let us assume, as Thomas Hobbs, that the human species is – at its core – chaotic, infantile, brutish, even murderous. He (and many like him) have therefore proposed that the solution is civilization, ie: education: a process of refinement; of enlightenment; of discipline; a process that (by due diligence) delivers us human beings to a place where we are able to guide those less clear out of the jungle.
But how can that work (from a logical point of view) if what we have started with is brutal and chaotic? How is it that out of this mess of nasty clay we are able to create beings that are enlightened? If we are to apply the “scientific method” to this premise of Hobbs et al don’t we run into a basic logical problem?
Further more, if we are to look at the application of human civilization to the species over the past twenty-five hundred years (since the Greeks) has it worked? (Especially now, let’s look at it.)
Most of our species lives in abject poverty. Hundreds of millions are starving to death, particularly children. Wars abound, carried out be ever more sophisticated machines of killing as developed by these superior minds. Only a small portion of the earth’s population (almost invariably those that have attained this enlightenment and discipline) are living well. A very few (the ones with the highest aptitude for working the tools of this civilization or have relatives good at it) are living really, really well (at least materially).
Are these people at the top examples of goodness (that would include all of us reading – and writing – this blog, I guess)? Have we been delivered from the jungle of chaos and violence by the civilization that has educated us, given us jobs, given us enlightening material to read, to watch, to ponder?
Has civilization worked for us? Has it worked for those who preside “over” us? Has it worked for those “under” us?
4 responses to Thomas Hobbs, Redux and Then Some
Thank you for posting this! It’s a wonderful response from Michael and gets to the heart of things I often wonder about myself…
The human beings that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, pre-civilization, were essentially biologically identical to us. With the same mental capacities, but without the combined knowledge generated by our species’ now grossly-inflated numbers, what did they think about?! I wonder…and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our lives today are much more enriched than theirs were, and that we must all be happier as a result, but how can that be? How could we have survived as a species if that was the case when, for the vast majority of human existence (not to mention the existence of our many and varied humanoid precursors) we weren’t “civilized”? Civilization surely has benefits, but as an experiment, it’s still young. We don’t yet know the results. And yet one of its byproducts is that we now have the time to wonder if it’s good or if it isn’t. But is *that* really good? Are we more fulfilled individuals for doing this? And deeper and deeper it goes, until it’s easy to see how madness really could be a civilized condition…
And then there’s overpopulation. Did big changes in the way we view nature and ourselves happen simultaneously with civilization? Or only once civilization had reached such points that we first experienced “crowding”? Or maybe the real question is when non-civilization became civilization? What was the tipping point? And what aspects of human behavior became amplified once we were settled, and which are the product of the settling itself?
I have no answers, only questions. But I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that much of humanity today, in its glorious civilized way, is living in conditions that are the epitome of “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
When do you consider “civilization” started? And what do we mean by that? I think we all agree on that it must have been long before the cultures that have left written evidences of a social life. The first being in the land between the two rivers, Mesopotamia, i.e. in todays Iraq.
Before that very complex thoughts were carried from generation to generation by the word of mouth, like the Scriptures and its many different sources.
In those times the brains were used to a fuller extent than now. The brains grew because Mankind had to think a lot to survive.
Was the town, as in Ur, the first sign of civilzation, when small villages were not enough? There you had to take a number of different inputs into account and creating laws was necessary. Is THAT an evidence of civilization?
“I am a stranger here myself and I dont know my way around”
Love equals Life.
Herman G.
Herman
It is a wonderful thing that we are actually free of our basic needs enough to engage in this type of dialogue. When Maslow created his basic needs chart it is probably safe to say that most humans were still in the lower end of finding food, shelter, clothing, etc. The fact that we are talking about the needs of self-actualization at the top of the chart should be some indication of where some of us have landed.
Having worked with the most vulnerable of our population- children with severe cognitive/social/emotional and disabilities, including Autism Spectrum Disorder, and bearing witness to the character, caring and devotion of the people who shepherd this flock, it is hard to cast all of human beings as brutish, uncivilized and so forth. These folks are not having these conversations as they are too busy caring for our disposable children. Perhaps they are the most highly evolved and civilized. What lessons can we learn from them?
All of these responses raise a number of interesting issues, and I can only try to address a few of them. First of all, thank you Stephen for posting my original email and cre4ating this opportunity for an interesting dialogue. Secondly, I am by no means an expert in any of this – I have simply been intrigued by the ideas I’ve run across in my reading and have been doing what I can in the limited time available to follow them out, and find that they have a deep resonance with so much else that is going on in my life.
When I first started thinking about the idea that civilization itself is a problem – in fact THE problem – in human life, it seemed pretty obvious that that was such a radical position that it would be extremely difficult to find others who agree. After all, we all grew up learning that civilization is the great advancement that humankind has made over the last 10,000 years or so and that as a result we are all so much better off than our poor deprived forebears. It has made possible great intellectual and artistic achievements, the formation of complex social structures, the amassing of great wealth (some people actually believe that to be a good!), and the development of extensive and ever-expanding knowledge. To even question that civilization is anything but one of the greatest achievements of human beings and the glorious end to which our species has always been striving has seemed unthinkable. I have been surprised, however, at the number of people who have written favorably and with great insight on these ideas and the number of more ordinary people who find these ideas congenial. I touched briefly on what may be at least reason for that in my original post – that we are rapidly experiencing the deleterious effects of civilization and thus its ills are becoming much more obvious than they have ever been before.
Most definitions of civilization that we run across are clearly laudatory – e.g., “a high stage of social and cultural development” from Webster’s, or “a developed or advanced state of human society” from the Oxford English Dictionary (both cited by Jensen in “Endgame”). Albert Schweitzer defined civilization as “the sum total of all progress made by man in every sphere of action and from every point of view in so far as the progress helps towards the spiritual perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress” (quoted in the Wikipedia article “Civilization”). A writer in 18th century Scotland said of civilization that “Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization” (quoted in the same Wikipedia article). These “definitions” all really only describe what the writer feels the effect of civilization is – they don’t tell us how to recognize civilization when we see it. The Wikipedia article itself, however, does provide some very useful concrete characteristics of civilization. It says, at the beginning, “A civilization is a complex society or culture group characterized by dependence upon agriculture, long-distance trade, state form of government, occupational specialization, urbanism, and class stratification. Aside from these core elements, civilization is often marked by any combination of a number of secondary elements, including a developed transportation system, writing, standards of measurement (currency, etc.), formal legal system, great art style, monumental architecture, mathematics, sophisticated metallurgy, and astronomy.”
Becky, in her post, makes the very important point that “for the vast majority of human existence . . . we weren’t ‘civilized.’” If we combine that true statement with another true statement that is so often overlooked and poorly understood, that human beings are first and foremost biological creatures that developed over hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years in intimate interactions with and adaptations to biological and physical nature, we begin to understand that the human species has inevitably adapted (and done so very well) to the lifestyle it followed for nearly its entire existence, save only the last few thousand years. That lifestyle involved generally small egalitarian communities following a hunter-gatherer economic system. Unlike what is often supposed, such communities had far more leisure than most modern humans do and enjoyed excellent health and a rich artistic, imaginative, and religious experience. For most of the history of civilization, such peoples were essentially invisible – anthropology (with respect to contemporary indigenous peoples) and archeology (with respect the prehistoric peoples) developed only within the last hundred years or so, and “civilized people saw their “barbarian” neighbors only as “primitive” people to ignored, or, more likely conquered and gotten rid of so that we can have access to their land and natural resources.
My path to a more radical understanding of civilization and its effects has developed out of several disparate paths. First, as I mentioned in my original post, my early reading of Lewis Mumford over 30 years ago planted the initial seed, but I did little with that until much more recently (the last five or six years or so). Second has been my developing interest in American Indians (yes, they generally prefer the term “Indian” over “Native-American,” though some more academically inclined Native-Americans do prefer the latter term), and broadening to an interest in indigenous peoples generally, which has greatly contributed to my understanding of human (as opposed to merely civilized) nature. Third, my fairly recent development of a radical left political view. For most of my life, I have held vague and rather unformed “liberal” political views, but beginning with the early years of the second Bush administration, I was forced to become much more radicalized (undoubtedly in concert with many others whose eyes were similarly opened by the sheer egregiousness of the Bush gang), with much credit to the tutelage offered by my oldest daughter who clearly beat me to the punch in understanding what was really going on. This led to intense and extensive reading in authors such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti (a radical left educator whose books are models of clarity, insight and exposition), Edward Said, among many others, and closer attention to a number of websites. Political maturity does not itself lead to a critique of civilization, but when combined with the other sources I have mentioned, it enables one to understand that the evils ascribed (correctly and accurately) to capitalism in its most egregious form (which we are increasingly experiencing once again after the cushion provided by the New Deal and its aftermath) are also characteristics engendered by civilization itself (though capitalism clearly exacerbates that) (it would take an entire book to support that statement, which I do not even pretend I have done here – see some of the books cited in my original post and also below). Finally, my training as a biologist with a primary interest in natural history, ecology, and evolution, have enabled me to understand the human being as primarily a biological creature still intensely dependent on a functioning biological and natural environment not merely for mere existence, but even more emphatically for the complete realization of an authentically human life. Among many other things, this background makes one susceptible to the immense sadness of seeing the destruction of nature, formerly only piecemeal, but now engulfing the entire world.
Perhaps the most useful thing I can do at this point is to mention a number of books in addition to those cited in my original post that I have found particularly useful, engaging, insightful and meaningful.
Thom Hartmann, “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.” The title has a double meaning, referring to the enlightened nature of pre-civilization cultures, now endangered, and to the impending exhaustion of oil, coal, gas, and similar energy sources that were formed many millions of years ago from decaying plant matter – plant bodies that were formed through photosynthesis, that is, the conversion of “ancient sunlight” to biological substance.
Jerry Mander, “In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations.” One of my most intense reading experiences, this book is so full of startling insights that I recommend it unreservedly and whole-heartedly.
William Catton, “Overshoot.” Catton, a sociologist, has written one of the clearest and most detailed expositions of human ecology, explaining why human beings are inextricably imbedded in nature and are deeply subject to the laws of ecology. This is the context in which Catton warns about the impending exhaustion of oil, the effect of industrial society in causing a tremendous population explosion to a scale that can be supported only by the artificial (and short-term) excess energy (at a factor of many times) provided by the oil economy, and the inevitable and horrific population crash that awaits us upon the impending depletion of usable oil. Along the way is the accompanying immense despoliation of our environment, with similarly catastrophic consequences. This book, a real intellectual tour-de-force (and the subject of numerous highly favorable reviews), was published in 1978, when Catton believed (though with little real expectation) that the worst effects could still be avoided. His more recent book, “Bottleneck” (2009) takes a much more pessimistic viewpoint. (By the way, this book leads to the topic of peak oil, and the depletion of energy resources, a different topic that I have also been following, but relevant because it is a result of civilization and also may result in the forced collapse at least of industrial civilization.
Daniel Quinn, “Ishmael,” and “The Story of B.” These are rather quirky novels (actually philosophical dialogues between the protagonist, a young boy in one book and a young girl in another and a gorilla, dressed up in the form of a novel). Despite their quirkiness, they are very interesting explorations of the themes we have been discussing, with many fascinating things I have not otherwise run across, including discussions of ancient middle-eastern stories, including some of the very early Biblical stories, as mythological accounts originating in dimly remembered (even at that time) interactions between early civilizations and the surrounding (now absorbed and no longer existing) indigenous tribes. A non-fiction book by the same author (not even pretending to be a novel), “Beyond Civilization,” speculates on what might follow the collapse of civilization and posits that post-civilization society need not be a return to hunter-gatherer existence (which given our numbers and the destruction of the environment is not possible in any case), but could be a richer human society based on principles antithetical to civilization.
Stanley Diamond, “In Search of the Primitive.” I have not read this book, though I plan to. I cite it primarily for it opening sentence, which Derrick Jensen is also fond of quoting: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” This is another assertion that seems unsupported here, but is fully supportable after reading much of the associated literature. Citing that makes me realize that I have done nothing in this post to further bolster this point of view, but I hope I have responded at least somewhat to some of the issues raised by the three previous responses and have provided some more context, if nothing else.