{"id":5262,"date":"2018-06-08T10:34:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T14:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/?p=5262"},"modified":"2023-12-16T16:02:12","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T21:02:12","slug":"50-the-state-of-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/?p=5262","title":{"rendered":"50. The State of Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"In<\/figure>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n

Chapter 2: What Were They Thinking?<\/p>\n

Digression: Government from the Paleolithic to Philadelphia<\/p>\n

Page 50: The State of Nature<\/p>\n

SIS (narrating)<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0Thomas Hobbes said life in the \u201cstate of nature\u201d must have been solitary… poor… nasty, brutish, and short.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hobbes going \u201chmm\u201d and imagining brutish cavemen.<\/em><\/p>\n

SIS (narrating)<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0He couldn\u2019t have been more wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Group of friends hugging.<\/em><\/p>\n

SIS (narrating)<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0After all, our natural state is how we evolved<\/strong> to live, before we invented government… the way that feels the most right…<\/strong> that just naturally works.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>And as it happens, we evolved for a life that was intensely social,<\/strong> not solitary! One that was richly fulfilling, pleasant, loving…\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>…and oh yeah — long!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hourglass<\/em>.<\/p>\n

SIS (narrating)<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0If they survived childhood, people apparently lived just as long as you or me.<\/p>\n

Prehistoric people camping by a river<\/em>.<\/p>\n

SIS (narrating)<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0Hobbes and Locke (and other philosophers like Marx) were trying to reason what life must<\/strong> have been like. But their conclusions tell us more about them and their own<\/strong> times.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines lets us say with confidence that the state of nature was actually<\/strong> kinda…<\/p>\n

y\u2019know\u2026<\/p>\n

WOMAN<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0…Sweet!<\/strong><\/p>\n

AVERAGE JOE<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0Oh. My god.\u00a0Could you be<\/strong> any more touchy-feely?<\/p>\n

SIS<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0Shut up!\u00a0\u00a0You\u2019re<\/strong> the sappy one, remember?\u00a0\u00a0Anyway, as I was saying…<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/div>View Transcript<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n

If you would like to learn more, here are just a few suggestions to get you started:<\/p>\n

50. The State of Nature<\/u><\/p>\n

Books:<\/span><\/p>\n

Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History<\/em>, Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore, transl., New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020.<\/p>\n

Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes<\/em>, London: Weikenfeld & Nicolson, 2016.<\/p>\n

A.P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes<\/em>, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.<\/p>\n

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind<\/em>, New York: HarperCollins, 2015.<\/p>\n

Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution<\/em>, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.<\/p>\n

For a contrarian approach, check out David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity<\/em>, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. But also see such reviews as Daniel Fischer, \u201cBook Review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity<\/em>,\u201d Interface<\/em>, Vol. 14, No. 1 (July 2023): 231-240; Markar Melkonian, \u201cThe Species Above Constraints: A Review of the Dawn of Everything,\u201d Historical Materialism<\/em> (August 2023).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Articles:<\/span><\/p>\n

Christine Cave, \u201cDid Ancient People Die Young? Many of Us Believe Our Ancestors Lived Much Shorter Lives than We Do. Cutting-Edge Archaeology Shows Otherwise,\u201d Aeon<\/em> (July 2018).<\/p>\n

Jenna Hendrick, \u201cWelcome Back to Caveman Times: Social Consequences of (Mis)Representations of the Paleolithic,\u201d Thesis, Binghamton University, 2016.<\/p>\n

Michael Gurcen, Hillard Kaplan, \u201cLongevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination,\u201d Population and Development Review<\/em>, Vol. 33, No. 2 (May 2007): 321-365.<\/p>\n

Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee, \u201cOlder Age Becomes Common Late in Human Evolution,\u201d Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em>, Vol. 101, No. 30 (July 2004): 10895-10900.<\/p>\n

Ralph Adolphs, \u201cCognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behaviour,\u201d Nature Reviews, Neuroscience<\/em>, Vol. 4 (March 2003): 165-178.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments!<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/div>View Further Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48,35,58,1,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-brief-history-of-government","category-constitutional-law","category-the-cognitive-revolution","category-uncategorized","category-what-were-they-thinking"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawcomic.net\/guide\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}