hobbes is wrong about human nature

7/29/2019 Hobbes is Wrong About Human Nature

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Hobbes is Wrong About Human Nature

Hobbes' characterization of the state of nature is incorrect because he bases it on false claims

about the level of resources available to primitive humanity, misapprehensions about the nature of

human beings, and incorrect information about the most relevant subjects to the understanding of the

state of nature: Native Americans. Specifically, Hobbes' Leviathan makes three false claims about the

natural human and the state of nature: the state of nature is one of scarcity, human beings do not

possess natural moral faculties, and human beings are non-social beings. When Hobbes'

characterization of the state of nature is relieved of these false claims, it becomes difficult to justify his

later assertions that the state of nature is a state of war and that human beings are motivated to the

creation of civil society because of the negative effect of the state of nature.

Before we discuss the specific shortfalls of Hobbes' characterization of the state of nature, it

would be useful to state his characterization accurately and in some detail. Hobbes begins hisdescription of the state of nature, inPart I: Chapter XII Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as

Concerning their Felicity and Misery, by stating that both the bodies and minds of all human beings are

equal, equal being defined as a difference not large enough to allow any one human to dominate any

other out of sheer strength or wit because a group of his or her peers could easily combine theirfaculties of mind and body to overthrow him or her (Points 1 and 2).1 In addition to possessing this

equality of mind and body, Hobbes asserts that human beings have an equal amount of hope inattaining their ends; attainment of these ends is frustrated because, the state of nature's being one of

scarcity, human beings end up seeking possession of the very same things and become enemies (Point

3).2 Hobbes argues that this diffidence of humans to each other means that no human being is secured

indefinitely by his own industry, wit, and strength (Point 4).3 Human beings, because of this insecurityhesitate to partake in industry, art, and trade for fear of invasion and being deprived of life, liberty, and

property (Points 4 and 9).4 Furthermore, human beings take no pleasure in and actively avoid the

company of other people because others pose a threat (Point 5).5 From these basic foundations of thehuman experience in the state of nature, Hobbes concludes that the state of nature is in fact a state of

war for all human beings: all against all (Point 8).6

Since human beings in the state of nature have noabsolute authority regulating their conduct, they are free to act in perfect liberty according to theirrightof nature to fulfill the primary law of nature which is to use all means to preserve one's self (Points 1

and 3 of Chapter XIV).7 So in this state of war, with the right of perfect liberty, there can be no

security for any human being, and nothing can be just or unjust. In the state of war there are no laws;

justice and injustice are not faculties of the human mind but are qualities that relate human beings insociety, not in solitude (Point 13).8 Human beings in the natural state of war are not in constant battle

but are never free of the possibility according to Hobbes (Point 8).9 They are driven by three principal

causes to quarrel: competition, diffidence, and desire for glory. Competition for limited resources


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causes human beings to invade for gain and to fight for the domination of others. Diffidence towards

their fellow human beings causes war to ensure one's security and to protect one's family. Desire for

glory causes human beings to fight over personal opinion and reputation (Point 6). 10 Hobbes concludes

that, in this state of war, there can be no society, no industry, no art, and no trade. Life is short, nasty,brutish, and solitary. Furthermore, this disastrous reality in which humanity finds itself in the state of

nature, combined with its passions (hope for industry, fear of death, and desires of life) and its reasoned

conclusions (laws of nature), forces human beings to seek civil society under covenants, forfeit theirright of nature, and establish an absolutist authority (Point 14).11 Though Hobbes admits that his state

of nature is hypothetical, he supports this characterization of the state of nature by asserting that it can

be viewed in a state divided by civil war, the behavior of states on the international scene, and theaccurate descriptions of Native American Peoples available to him at the time (Points 11 and12).12

Indeed, in the state of civil war, a situation that Hobbes endured in England during the 17th century, the

condition of man is very much like Hobbes' state of nature: a state of war among all men. And stateson the international scene act very much like the human beings of Hobbes's characterization of the state

of nature. They spy, sabotage, and go to war with one another for the three primary reasons men fight

in the state of nature: competition, diffidence, and glory. Finally, Native Americans, according to

Hobbes, are driven by their natural lust, have no government, and live in brutish ways thus confirminghis characterization of the state of nature because Native Americans are the closest active example of

the historical state of nature (Point 11).13

Most critical to Hobbes' characterization of the state of nature is his assumption that it is a state

of scarcity where human beings conflict necessarily over limited resources. This claim of scarcity

becomes questionable when one asks what legitimate basis, if any, Hobbes lays in support of this

claim. Hobbes reasons from his experience during the English Civil War and the struggles of European

nation states that the state of nature must be a condition of scarcity because the state of nature is less

developed than the current developed state of English civil society, and even this superior society

exhibits scarcity. Hobbes' assumption that the state of nature could not be more plentiful than England

in a state of peace or war, or that of the nations on the international scene, is based solely on biased

conjecture. It is questionable, at best, to extrapolate that the level of scarcity experienced by England

in a state of civil war or by the nation states' warring internationally is comparable or even closely

related to the level of scarcity, if any, experienced by humans in the state of nature. His European

examples ignore other prevalent reasons as to why the state of England and the state of most European

nations during the 17th century was one of scarcity, reasons which include corrupt political systems


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(feudalism, absolutism, monarchy), corrupt religious institutions (Catholic church, Church of England),

poor sanitation, overpopulation, militarism (the institution of war) and poverty. Neither were these

conditions primarily linked to war. If Hobbes had actually lived as most Englishmen did during the 17 th

century, he would have barely noticed the difference between a state of peace and a state of civil war in

terms of scarcity.

Further evidence that Hobbes presents that might have been of value to discovering what the

state of nature is, specifically in its level of scarcity, is inaccurate and ethnocentric. It is testimony from

the New World after more than 100 years of European conquest, a conquest which can be categorized

as no less than the largest and most thorough event of genocide in recorded human history, one

eliminating entire peoples and leaving those that survived at less than five percent of their original

size.14 The observations that Hobbes cites as evidence of the scarcity characterizing the state of nature,

if they are even to be believed as unbiased, are useless because they depict the behavior of Native

Americans after their systemic generational decline with an attendant loss of their heritage, knowledge,

wealth, and hope. It would be like basing one's characterization of human society exclusively on the

later generations of survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Furthermore, there were, in Hobbe's own time,

much better and more accurate records about the European experience with Native Americans from the

very inception of their unfortunate relationship, records that do not suggest scarcity or a natural

diffidence. As Columbus described first hand in a letter written during his 1492 voyage upon the Nina:

[So] all the other [islands] are very fertile to an excessive degree, and this one especially. In it there are many harbors onthe sea coast, beyond comparison with others which I know in Christendom, and numerous rivers, good and large, which is

marvelous...All [trees] are most beautiful, of a thousand kinds and tall and they seem to touch the sky; and I am told thatthey never lose their foliage, which I can believe...the lands are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, and for

livestock of every sort, and for building towns and villages....The people of this island and of all the other islands which I

have found and seen, or have not seen, all go naked...Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather

they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts... 15

The testimony Hobbes presents of Native Americans or savages is selective at best. The people


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described by Columbus seem to be altruistic and sociable. The land which they inhabited, as David E.

Stannard, ofAmerican Holocaustsays, seems to have been a land of plenty, a real-life Eden.. This

reality of the state of nature in the New World as a land of plenty inhabited by tens of millions of

Native Americans is confirmed by recent archaeological and historical evidence.16 From the

panhandle of Alaska south through the upper northwest and on down to the California border lived so

many different cultural communities, densely settled and thickly populated, that we have no hope of

recovering anything close to a complete record of their vibrant past.17 Even the Inuit who lived the

harshest climate imaginable in the New World survived and flourished in an environment of relative

plenty: [T]he early inhabitants of the Arctic and Subarctic possessed all the tools 'that gave them an

abundant and secure economy [and] they developed a way of life that was probably as rich as any other

in the nonagricultural and nonindustrial world.18 Furthermore, even if one is tempted to say that the

Inuit do not qualify as humans in the state of nature due to their technical sophistication, there are those

Native Americans, such as the Ohlones, who could, with little or no technical ability, find endless

sustenance:

[T]he Ohlones did not depend upon a single staple. If the salmon failed to run, the

people moved into the marshes to hunt ducks and geese. If the waterfowl populationwas diminished by a drought the people could head for the coast where a beached

whale or a run of smelts might help them through their troubles. And if all else failed,

there were always shellfish, mussels, clams, and oysters...All around the Ohlones were

virtually inexhaustible resources; and for century after century the people went about

their daily life secure in the knowledge that they lived in a generous land, a land that

would always support them.19

It would seem that Hobbes' claim, that the state of nature is defined by scarcity, is false, raised

on baseless assumptions and poor historical evidence. Likewise, his claim that human beings do not

naturally possess moral faculties may prove equally unfounded. Hobbes contends that a human being in

the state of nature has the Right of Nature, the right to do whatever he or she wants, perfect liberty. But


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this is a simplistic conception which results from the one-dimensional materialistic philosophy which

Hobbes uses to explain human behavior. Human beings, like many other mammals, have ingrained

behaviors which regulate their social interactions. Human beings instinctively understand personal

territory, personal possession, aversion to the murdering of one's own kind, theft, friendship,

dishonesty, and rudimentary concepts of justice. The human being which Hobbes associates with

normalcy would be classified as a sociopath. Furthermore, if one examines the moral beliefs of people

living in relatively free societies (no nationwide state of religious, moral education) such as Canada in

the last decades of the 20th century, one sees a consistent and natural agreement among most people of

what is just and unjust. Though one might argue my observations might reflect the same Hobbesian

problems of extrapolating from one's own societal period, other observers have made this truth clear in

cross-observations of the the societies of the Native Americans at the time of the first contacts with

Europe. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1543 recorded: Again and again, wherever he went, he marveled

at the 'many pueblos,' the 'dense population,' and the 'thickly settled' coasts and plains. Even the small

[islands]....were populated by 'a great number of Indians' who greeted the Spanish ships in friendship

and traded with them in ceremonies of peace.20 These Native Americans in the state of nature are

nothing like Hobbes conception of human beings; all at war with one another. The natives clearly had

moral faculties expressing their generosity, friendship, and sense of justice with the arriving Europeans

offering to share the natural bounty that the New World provided. They also clearly expressed moral

faculties, specifically a sense of injustice, when they attempted to rid their lands of Columbus, during

the first invasion of the New World, after he had indiscriminately slaughtered the Native American

hosts and their families.21 Furthermore, it was the Europeans, in this case the Spaniards, the men who

were under an absolutist monarch, the men who were supposedly bound by covenant and cultured in


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morality, who committed injustices unmatched until the atrocities of the Third Reich:

[W]henever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule

among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would preventIndians from daring to think of themselves as human beings....they would cut off an Indian's hands and leave them dangling

by a shred of skin...[t]hey would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing

off of heads and cutting bodies in half with one blow....[in an] encounter [with] an Indian woman they tore the child fromthe mother's arms and flung it still living to [a] dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes...22

It was not the men of civil society who acted morally, who knew of justice and injustice, it was the

human beings, the Native Americans, in the state of nature who acted morally. It is much more

plausible that human beings in the state of nature have natural moral faculties. The immoral savages

that Hobbes imagines are nothing but extensions of ethnocentric and religious intolerance prevalent

among the educated class of 17th century Europe. The savages of Hobbes conception of the state of

nature were, in fact, terrorizing the peoples of the New World, deranged from the barbaric

indoctrination of 17th century institutions.

Finally, regarding Hobbes' third false claim, that human beings in the state of nature are averse

to socializing because of their diffidence towards one another, there are several problems beyond

historical evidence regarding Native Americans that raise doubts about its validity. In Hobbes

conception of the bridge from the state of nature to civil society and the functioning of that civil society

within itself, language with the ability to manipulate language in speech plays the vital and sole role of

facilitating co-operation and covenant. The question arises, how could human beings, driven to

isolation by diffidence, and adverse to socializing, have developed language, let alone covenants?

Human beings clearly could not have, so one must conclude that human beings were necessarily

communicating with one another in the state of nature. Furthermore, it is obvious that this

communication went beyond threats because the structure of human languages is primarily co-


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operative, reasoning, and descriptive. Language did not spontaneously appear; it was not invented in

civil society; it was developed as a natural faculty through human interactions ranging from conflict to

terms of endearment. If we examine mammals, we find they too have natural faculties of language and

are naturally disposed to sociability: dogs bark and whimper; whales sing; and apes hoot and holler.

Even mammals of different species use natural faculties of body language that allow them to interpret

each other's mental states. The uncanny communication is apparent to anyone who has had a pet. For

historical evidence, beyond which as already been cited, there are the great lengths to which

Californian Native Americans, cited by Hobbes as examples of the natural man, socialized with their

fellow human beings:

The peoples of resource rich California also were known for their complicated coastal-

inland trade networks and for their large multi-cultural fiestas which apparently

functioned in part to maintain and expand trade relationships...the California peoples

were noteworthy for their remarkably egalitarian and democratically ordered societies.As anthropologists long ago demonstrated native California peoples such as the Wintu

found it difficult even to express personal domination and coercion in their language,

so foreign were those concepts to their way of life. And for most of California's Indian

peoples those ways of life were directly tied to the great bounty nature had given to

them.23

Clearly human beings, like most creatures on earth, especially mammals, are naturally inclined to

socializing and naturally endowed with methods of communication, such as language. Hobbes cannot

explain the origin of language from the premise of an unsocial human being in the state of nature

because his claim is false.

Before concluding this criticism of Hobbes' characterization of the state of nature it would be

of value in understanding the source of his misconceptions to emphasize the condition of England

during the 17th century even in times of peace. England in the 17th century, a time when life was

generally improving, could be described as a never-ending nightmare. Throughout Europe, including

England, about half the children born only lived past the age of ten. As winter approached the poor and


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destitute sold themselves as galley slaves while the unlucky ones who could not sell themselves, or

refused to, froze to death. In the summer the plague swept the cities preying on the poor majority as

the rich fled to the country side.24 But it was not just the plague but typhus, diphtheria, influenza,

measles, fever and more that killed tens of thousands of Englishmen year after year, diseases caused by

poor sanitation and overcrowded cities. There was also perpetual starvation amongst the poor while the

rich ate to excess. The majority of people were stricken by such poverty that they lived on a margin of

endless hunger, literally living or dying with the fluctuation of grain prices.25 As described by David

E. Stannard, in American Holocaust, the streets and people of England's cities were unbelievable filthy

and morally depraved:

Roadside ditches, filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines in the cities of the

fifteenth century, and would continue to do so for centuries to follow. So too would

other noxious habits and public health hazards...the practice of leaving the

decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the streets, to London's special

problem, as historian Lawrence stone put it, of poor's holes. These were large,

deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row upon row.

Only when the pit was filled with bodies was it finally covered over with earth...Along

with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly displayed dead...[m]ost people

never bathed, not once in their entire lifetime...it was the norm for men and women tohave bad breath from the[ir] rotting teeth and constant stomach disorders...

[Furthermore,] [s]treet crime in most cities lurked around every corner. One especially

popular technique for robbing someone was to drop a heavy rock or chunk of masonry

on his head from an upper-story window and then to rifle the body for jewelry and

money.26

The common people of 17th century England in their grand commonwealth, in times of peace no less,

lived lives of desperation, of doing whatever it took to survive in a state of disease, tyranny, poverty,

and scarcity. Although Hobbes is incorrect in his assertion that, in the state of nature, human beings are

in a state of war, struggling with scarcity, incapable of morality, and averse to social contact, with a

little understanding of the conditions of the civilized society he so lauded, it is obvious where this

characterization came from.

Hobbes characterization of the state of nature is not completely incorrect, but the three false


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claims that he makes: scarcity, non-existent morality, and unsociability, result in a characterization

which fits his ethnocentric and religious bias. Hobbes is correct in his description of human beings as

equals in the state of nature and in his elucidation of the primary law of nature which drives them

towards self preservation, but the condition of scarcity and the resulting unsociability and immorality

were not a reality of the state of nature but a reality of 17 th century England. In peace England was a

land of scarcity for the common man, a place rife with crime where men were in a state of war, all

against all, perpetually indifferent to one another. Though England did have industry, culture, and art,

industry was pitifully inefficient and social benefits were isolated to a tiny minority at the top of the

societal hierarchy. Hobbes assumed that, because England was a commonwealth, the state of nature

must have been worse than the period in which he lived. Additionally, he assumed, as a Christian, that

the state of nature was much like the fall of man from Eden, a state that necessarily, in Christian

theology, had to be inferior to the Christian England of the 17th century. Hobbes insisted that the state

of nature must resemble the state of civil war from the bias of his own culture because, as a man of the

higher classes, it was one event with sufficient impact on established order to trouble even a man such

as himself. Hobbes was so blinded by his cultural education that he believed that the institutions of his

time could not have been the cause of detrimental human behavior either in times of peace or in times

of war. Hobbes' characterization of the state of nature is a symptom of Hobbes' denial that the

condition that harmed him most, the condition of Civil War, was not a reflection of some revealed non-

English barbarism of the past or some foreign savage, but the result of the institutions and traditions of

English society. Furthermore, his description of the three principle causes of quarrel between men in

the state of nature, these being competition, diffidence, and the desire for glory, are not descriptions of

human behavior in the state of nature but of the behavior of the leaders of institutions of English and


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European states. The imperial institutions of war, absolutism, Christianity, and monarchy, so

thoroughly developed in Europe, and epitomized by England's conquest of the world, were responsible

for the conflict caused by competition, diffidence, and a desire for glory. Human beings in the state of

nature have no need for conflict or the threat of conflict on a perpetual basis because the bounty of

nature is large enough to ensure human beings meet and exceed their basic desires. It is the men

empowered by institutions that create wants that exceed well beyond basic sustenance, that are in a

constant state of war; fighting for glory, because of diffidence, and because of competition. Absolutist

rulers, kings, men of religious authority, these people desire political domination, gold, silver, land, and

slaves. The goals of these institutions have unlimited scope; they empower men of stature with desires

to dominate the whole of mankind. Hobbes' characterization of the state of nature is false on historical

grounds and revealing of Hobbes' unwavering belief that England and its institutions of commonwealth

represented the height of humanity.

It is not the contention of this essay that the state of nature was a perpetual Eden filled with

semi-clad altruistic human beings, but to refute error within Hobbes' characterization. Hobbes'

characterization of human behaviour might be more appropriate when applied to select occurrences of

scarcity in the state of nature such as cases of cataclysmic events (natural disaster or arrival of the

Spanish) or to periods of systemic, manmade scarcity, as was the case in 17 th century England. Hobbes'

analysis suffers from his assumption of his own society's superiority, a sense of superiority that

generally pervades developed civilizations, especially those in a position of international hegemony. It

is the very same superiority complex that pervades the modern world dominated by the most virulent

form of Capitalism The elite who dominate economic, political, and religious institutions enjoy an


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unwaivering faith in the model of global society they craft. They assume that their position, wealth,

and the institutions they represent are a natural result, an evolution, from previous primitive states.

Anything that stands in the way of their institutional goals, anything that threatens their position, no

matter how justified, is perceived as backwards, uninformed reaction. In reality, there is no natural

evolution in the structure of society; it does not always progress; society can get worse; society can be

worse. The unwinding of society, the collapse of a commonwealth or international peace, is not the

result of the forces of nature and man's primitive drives but the result of a crumbling of inauthentic

institutions crafted by the fallible minds of men.

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hobbes is wrong about human nature

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