State of Nature

Graeber & Wengrow's Dawn of Everything opens with a discussion of the (admittedly one-sided, since Hobbes had been dead for a a century) debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature: the way humans are in the absence of society. Hobbes holds that humans are, by nature, in a state of war against all others: in the absence of a social contract or bodies to enforce it, everyone's only incentive is to seek their own benefit. Rousseau contrasts this with an Edenic vision of true freedom, where the introduction of the law and private property serve as a form of original sin that takes us away from that natural state. Ever since I read Dawn I've been thinking about this debate . For Graeber & Wengrow it's an entirely false one, predicated on false notions about the divide between pre-agrarian and agrarian society. They may not be wrong, but the philosophy major in me dies hard and I can still enjoy meaningless questions.

It should come as no surprise that I tend to fall more on the Rousseaultian side of things philosophically. But as I watch how people respond to the erosion of the neoliberal state before our eyes I find myself questioning those assumptions. I guess it's important to remember that Rousseau's state of nature was something more like a blank slate: people are free to be as good or as evil as they wish to be. Rousseau's model doesn't assume that we were all sin-free before the introduction of laws and rules, just that we are shaped by them in a way we weren't before. So the fact that people seem to be imitating the kleptocracy we live in at every level of scale doesn't necessarily contradict him.

Still the rapid decline of the social contract gives me pause when I want to assume the best (or even just the not-worst) in human nature. Some combination of COVID, the internet, and of course the rampant destruction of an already-fragile state seems to just have made everyone worse. The helpers are still out there helping, but it seems like a more overwhelming battle than ever before. I have been critical of liberalism in the past but I certainly prefer it to authoritarianism and its attendant cruelties. Things I have long thought of as uncontroversial, like "kindness is good" and "racism is bad", are apparently up for debate again. People are gleefully dropping the R-word again like they've spent the past decade salivating for a chance. Maybe they have!

I have written at length before about being mystified by culture over the past few years. In my personal life I have made a pretty strong effort to surround myself with kind and caring friends and to pursue things that interest me rather than whatever is Of The Moment. So when I read the news or check social media or whatever I feel like I'm playing a game of telephone about the state of the world. Mostly my little corner of it is pretty nice but from what I hear things out there are getting pretty bad. Hard for me to tell though. I'm getting other people's algorithmic blinders secondhand so maybe there's a prism through which things are great. I am of the mind that people like Steven Pinker who are peddling "This Is Fine" have a vested interest in continuing to convince our various bugman emperors that they are not in fact naked but what the hell do I know.

Anyway to take it back to the original thought: I am wondering a lot about what the truth of the state of nature argument is. I am generally inclined to think that a lot of the venom and violence we see today is not because Hobbes was right but because we are in a political environment that encourages it and an information environment that has completely shattered the sense of a shared reality. It's easy to not care about the rights of man if your information ecosystem has convinced you that your opponents aren't human anymore. But unfortunately my belief that people aren't inherently like this, that it is in fact possible for us to be better than we are, has not brought me to any solutions for actually getting there. We certainly appear to be reaching the tail end of post-enlightenment thinking. Maybe we're due for another dark age and we can get it right on the next round.