[Futurework] Hobbes

[Ed Weick]

Having glanced through it rather quickly when it was first posted, I’ve just reread Stephen Straker’s piece on Hobbes.  I must say I’ve never felt comfortable with Hobbes’ articulation of man in the "state of nature".  It depicts man as solitary, acting only to satisfy himself, being nothing more than an "organic automaton".  Personally, I don’t think it was ever like that.  First, we have always lived not by ourselves, but in groups, and groups were always governed by codes of behaviour.  Second, groups interacted, and this again required codes of behaviour.  Only in extreme cases would inter-group actions lead to physical strife.  Third, since whenever it was that we became fully human, we have had an enormous capacity for invention and projection, including the invention of supreme beings that provide a supernatural overly to how we must behave and original states of being that remind us that we have behaved much better in the past.  Gods and Gardens of Eden are ancient and have existed since time immemorial.  Stories that govern morality, part myth but also part history, have been told and retold for many thousands of years.  Noah’s flood is an example. I caught a glimpse of how ancient some of these stories may be back in the 1970s when I attended a hearing in the small community of Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta.  One of the elders of the community, a Gwich'in Indian, was trying to explain to the presiding judge about how his people relate to their land.  His story was essentially about man’s courage in the face of a great flood that killed many people and animals and created several great rivers, the Mackenzie, the Yukon, the Porcupine and the Mississippi among them.  I happened to be sitting next to a geologist who knew the geological history of the region, and I asked him whether the story might have had any basis in reality.  He answered in the affirmative, saying that, toward the end of the last ice age, a huge wall of ice that had confined a enormous amount of meltwater suddenly gave way and flooded the whole of the Porcupine Basin.  I asked him how long ago that might have happened, and he said perhaps eight to ten thousand years ago.  A thing told and retold over the millennia to remind people of who they were, where they came from, and how they should behave. Yet, having said the foregoing, I must admit that Hobbes may have a point.  Last night I watched a TV special on the role of journalists, mostly embedded, in the invasion of Iraq.  Many of the scenes suggested a complete breakdown of civil institutions and of personal morality.  The American soldiers the journalists were traveling with were clearly frightened, and their only thought was 'to get the motherfuckers before they get us'.  They were jubilant when they knocked out an Iraqi position, killing several people.  Given their superior fire power, it was not a fair fight, but of course fairness was the last thing in their mind.  Other scenes depicted Iraqi civilians carrying off loot, much as Hobbes’ "organic automaton" would have carried off loot.  But there were some scenes that suggested that Hobbes may not have had it right, scenes of medical staff in hospitals desperately trying to look after the wounded and dying under impossible conditions, and the faces of women who mourned but refused to break down because they had seen all this many, many times before over many thousands of years. Ed Weick