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
