Chapter 2: What Were They Thinking?
Digression: Government from the Paleolithic to Philadelphia
Page 50: The State of Nature
SIS (narrating): Thomas Hobbes said life in the “state of nature” must have been solitary… poor… nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes going “hmm” and imagining brutish cavemen.
SIS (narrating): He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Group of friends hugging.
SIS (narrating): After all, our natural state is how we evolved to live, before we invented government… the way that feels the most right… that just naturally works. And as it happens, we evolved for a life that was intensely social, not solitary! One that was richly fulfilling, pleasant, loving… …and oh yeah — long!
Hourglass.
SIS (narrating): If they survived childhood, people apparently lived just as long as you or me.
Prehistoric people camping by a river.
SIS (narrating): Hobbes and Locke (and other philosophers like Marx) were trying to reason what life must have been like. But their conclusions tell us more about them and their own times.
Nowadays, evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines lets us say with confidence that the state of nature was actually kinda…
y’know…
WOMAN: …Sweet!
AVERAGE JOE: Oh. My god. Could you be any more touchy-feely?
SIS: Shut up! You’re the sappy one, remember? Anyway, as I was saying…
If you would like to learn more, here are just a few suggestions to get you started:
50. The State of Nature
Books:
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore, transl., New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020.
Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, London: Weikenfeld & Nicolson, 2016.
A.P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, New York: HarperCollins, 2015.
Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
For a contrarian approach, check out David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. But also see such reviews as Daniel Fischer, “Book Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” Interface, Vol. 14, No. 1 (July 2023): 231-240; Markar Melkonian, “The Species Above Constraints: A Review of the Dawn of Everything,” Historical Materialism (August 2023).
Articles:
Christine Cave, “Did Ancient People Die Young? Many of Us Believe Our Ancestors Lived Much Shorter Lives than We Do. Cutting-Edge Archaeology Shows Otherwise,” Aeon (July 2018).
Jenna Hendrick, “Welcome Back to Caveman Times: Social Consequences of (Mis)Representations of the Paleolithic,” Thesis, Binghamton University, 2016.
Michael Gurcen, Hillard Kaplan, “Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (May 2007): 321-365.
Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee, “Older Age Becomes Common Late in Human Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 101, No. 30 (July 2004): 10895-10900.
Ralph Adolphs, “Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behaviour,” Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, Vol. 4 (March 2003): 165-178.
Feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments!