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You are misrepresenting Hobbes here to say that he was referring to the absence of a community... Sapiens have always lived in communities. He was referring spe
by soledades 6y ago
You are misrepresenting Hobbes here to say that he was referring to the absence of a community... Sapiens have always lived in communities. He was referring specifically to humans in the condition in the absence of state power:
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.
The "nasty brutish, and short" bit follows in an elaboration of this condition in the next paragraph.
and THIS is contradicted, if not by the article, then by the book it is reviewing. In particular:
To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our 'natural state'. Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare. In later periods, it's a different story. 'War does not go forever backwards in time,' says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. 'It had a beginning'
- fancyfredbot 6y agoYes, good point. I agree community wasn't a perfect word to represent what Hobbes meant. I considered using "society" and "the leviathan", maybe they would work better. It is interesting to consider that part of the book, it does seem to disagree with Hobbes at first glance. Hobbes did say that the state of nature was violent. However I think he also thought that a fear of violence would spontaneously cause humankind to organise into societies. So I'm not sure he'd necessarily be that surprised to find a lack of evidence for prehistoric warfare.
- btilly 6y agoYour summary of what the book says is directly at odds with data that I've seen in books like Enlightenment Now. https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-a-look-at-the-data-5af708f47fba https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-... does a good job of summarizing the data. Every archeological site on record and every primitive society we have been able to study records a rate of death by human violence that exceeds by orders of magnitude what is seen in modern civilized societies. In fact they all exceed what happened in the USA+Europe from 1900-1960, and usually by a large multiple. Even with 2 world wars, Western civilization killed fewer per capita in violence than any previous period in history that we have data for. In short, Hobbes was right. Every attempt that I have seen at taking a quantitative approach has backed that up.
- dundarious 6y agoI’d encourage you to read R. Brian Ferguson’s work, especially Pinker’s List. It goes into Pinker’s methodological errors (basically, he double counts much of his data, and even without that, is over confident of the explanatory power of that data). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_List_Exaggerating_Prehistoric_War_Mortality https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_...
- soledades 6y agoTwo paragraphs above the part I quoted: What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent. Further info: The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'