And the state of nature, nasty, poor, brutish, and short, or so said Thomas Hobbes. But it seems Hobbes was wrong. Humans have always lived in society. That doesn't mean they lived in cities or nations, of course, but they've always been social animals, just like our sister species the chimps and the gorilla. But what sort of society did they live in?
Thom Hartmann thinks we were democrats in a state of nature. In an op-ed arguing (rightly, I think) that the decline of the middle class is leading to oligarchy, a "feudal aristocracy" (backed up by a recent survey of American mean incomes, which have dropped around 10% in many states since the beginning of the Bush Administration, and have been declining for a quarter of a century, with wealth concentrating in the hands of a relative few, but that's another issue), Hartmann says this:
It turns out that the Founders knew something Hobbes didn't know: political democracy and an economic middle class is the natural state of humankind. Indeed, it's the natural state of the entire animal kingdom.
For example, biologists used to think that animal societies were ruled by alpha males. Recent studies, however, have found that while it's true that alpha males (and females, in some species) have the advantage in courtship rituals, that's where their power ends. Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt discovered that animals don't follow a leader but instead move together.
Can you spot the logical fallacy? Or rather fallacies, because there's at least two. The first is the fallacy of overgeneralisation. Merely because some species behave in a consensual manner doesn't therefore mean all do, or even that it is the "natural" human condition. It might be that humans are in fact different in that respect (after all we are different in a number of other respects). The other is the Naturalistic Fallacy. This is not a formal fallacy but an error of ethical or normative reasoning, first named by G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica, according to which the mistake is to identify some good or moral principle with a natural state. The fallacy was, ironically, devised to counter the claim of Herbert Spencer that the natural state of humans as they evolved, and the natural process of evolution, give us clues or principles of what is right.
And it is an old fallacy. The use of examples of nature to illustrate or support some moral principle goes back to the classical era. It is the very same mistake made by the conservative commentators who argued from the existence of "monogamy" in Emperor Penguins to the claim that monogamy was natural (for us!). It doesn't matter if some other species, or even our own, is monogamous or democratic or authoritarian or savage in a state of "nature". Morally, we choose what to do based on what we think is noble or right. Besides, there are always as many, or more, disanalogies as their are analogies. Emperor Penguins are monogamous... for exactly one breeding season. Perhaps we should all swap partners every year too?
But is this phenomenon even "democracy"? Democracy as I was taught it means that we elect those who choose our laws and make our policy and administer our society. What Hartmann is appealing to here is a rather different phenomenon - convention. In David Lewis's famous study Convention he discusses how arbitrary choices become a shared consensus by imitation, such as driving on the left in Britain, and on the right in France. Conventions occur when agents make adjustments to the behaviours of those around them, which is what the flocking behaviour of birds and herds exhibits. Sure, there is no single leader here, but neither is there a social legislation or elected representation. This is more like the dynamics of the market or fashion than it is like democracy.
In forager societies (once called "hunter-gatherers") there are certainly leaders, but in small tribal groups there are also councils of elders who vet that leadershp and make policy decisions. Humans are natively (note that I don't say "innately"; I'll blog on that one day) hierarchial in social status, but the sort of open democracy of a village or tribe that the Iroquois or Germanic tribes had was made possible in virtue of being small enough for everyone to consult with each other. But in the larger contexts of coalitions of tribes, something akin to a representative democracy was indeed necessary. And these were, as best I can interpret it, leaders.
Human behaviour does not greatly vary in different societies, but the social structures it generates depends a lot on the contingent history of the society in question. One of the main advantages of an open society that is democratic is that it legislates without regard to status, and has checks and balances against our native tendency to favour kin, allies and ourselves when we can get away with it. And what is happening now is that in many western societies we are seeing a new monied power elite evade the traditional and constituional checks and balances, and yes, it has to do with the decline of an educated and empowered (how I hate that word!) middle class. But let us never think that if only we gave free reign tour nature all would be well and utopian. What we are seeing now is the result of our natures. The benefit of democracy is that it runs against our nature, and that is why we should protect it against corruption.
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For starters, I suspect a lot of people are simply identifying "democracy" with Rousseau's antimodern vision. But the thing is, Rousseau and Hobbes are both full of crap, because neither of their scenarios is stable!
Rousseau is easy: Any time you have a bunch of people around, some of them will seek to gain power. No human society is capable of suppressing the will to power, because our instincts include all the responses comprising a dominance heirarchy.
Hobbes is almost as easy: When things get nasty enough, humans tend to do something about it! They gather into tribes, and set up basic rules to limit conflict within the tribe. Then they gang up on outside threats, and cooperate to solve pragmatic problems. Interpersonal power differences are always a problem, but there are practical limits to such differences, because if the top dog gets too much attitude, the betas can gang up against him!
Applying this in our current political situation, the formerly heirarchical (republican) system is being broken down by the neocons, as they seize control of the (social) power-distribution apparatus. The problem for them is, once they break up the structures forming our republic, there's not enough structural connection between them and the rest of American society -- all those other social identities and power bases that were formerly bound to them, by their common membership in "America" as such. This is already leading to the uppity neocons getting reconsidered as a separate "tribe", which presumes to give orders to all the other "tribes", while violating the very laws that underlie their own power.
The neocons figure they're unstoppably powerful because they control the "levers" which customarily represent the powers of law, force, and mercantile dominance. But if the other components of America start declining to cooperate, the neocons eventually will find their levers swinging loose. Of course, it's another question entirely, just who if anyone takes over those various powers!
Interesting read!
>the mistake is to identify some good or moral principle with a natural state.
On the other hand, what is a natural trait or principle (and has been that for some time) we know has been tested and passed (that is the principle of natural selection, after all). And that which has passed tests of various harshness is usually good; the harsher and longer the test, the stronger this principle. For example, our natual instinct to defend ourselves has been harshly tested for a long time (if you failed, you might be killed or seriously injured). Thus the principle to defend yourself can be called "good" on the grounds it being natural alone.
>This is more like the dynamics of the market or fashion than it is like democracy.
But the market is a democratic system; we elect our products by buying them; those who gets the most votes make money and can use that money to empower themselves with actions such as putting other products on the market.
>The benefit of democracy is that it runs against our nature, and that is why we should protect it against corruption.
Well, the specific human nature of helping friends and family first, yes, as you argued. However you cannot say it runs against our nature in general - many of our natural behaviours thrive in a democracy, such as our natural tendency to gain power, small or big.
David Harmon wrote:
> Applying this in our current political situation
What makes you think this blog is particularly about America? Jeez.
If I recall my political philosophy correctly, Hobbes' position was more in the way of a thought experiment rather than a guess at how society actually operated at some time in the past.
utenzi, I was reminded only a day ago that Hobbes was running a reductio of what life would be like without society, rather than proposing an actual "state of nature". Thanks for the correction. Old Tom is often misread, and I should have gone and cracked my references before doing that myself.
"State of nature" speculation was common amongst 17th and early 18th century political philosophers. Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau and others all used hypothetical "natural" men as justification for their political views. As you pointed out, it's all based on an erroneous assumption that there's a material distinction between a "natural" person and an "unnatural" person--as if naked hunters in the jungles is "natural" but sophisticated philosophers living in big cities is "unnatural". "Natural", in a colloquial sense, means "what I'm used to", and hence "unnatural" means "it differs from what I'm used to." So since other organisms don't build railways systems or crash planes into buildings, that means they're all "natural" while mankind is "unnatural" (or "supernatural" depending on whom you ask).
Thank God for David Hume. He was one of the first philosophers of the modern era to come along and point out that this whole distinction between natural and unnatural, and that reasoning from "is" to "ought", is utterly nonsensical. Of course, ancient philosophers like Epicurus and Lucretius also hinted at this same thing, but their writings were declared heretical, pagan, unorthodox, unnatural, etc...