Hobbes is really sticking in my craw tonight, for whatever reason. This is a condensed version of the longer paper I posted earlier. It doesn’t have the exegesis, so if you want a presentation of Hobbes’ argument, go to that one.

Or read the book yourself. The edition I cited in the earlier paper is:

Hobbes, Thomas. [i]The Leviathan[/i], with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company. 1994.

Anyway. Without further ado, a condensed attack upon Thomas Hobbes:

Considering the following to be true, scarce resources, a rough equality of mental/physical prowess, and a general tendency to seek glory, in a Hobbesian state of nature, the following options remain with regard toward the procurement of basic resources, necessary for human survival and the initial building block of any society.

Scarce resources. If success in the procurement of those resources necessary for the continuation of one’s life is not guaranteed; if success in the procurement of resources varies from day to day and from one person to another; then no matter how good I might have things today in terms of the resources available to me, this will not always be the case. Or at least, I can conceive of this not always being the case. If necessary resources are genuinely scarce, there will, or at least could, come a time when I will not have the resources necessary for my survival. And then I will die.

(Hobbes doesn’t say anything about this, but there is also the issue of dependants: I might be able to procure enough food or water or whathaveyou for myself, but if I can’t provide for my children, too, then I’ll have cut myself out of the gene pool. Now to be fair, Hobbes was writing before Darwin and Wallace - but that’s just one more reason we shouldn’t be taking him seriously today!)

In such a case, my survival–my self-preservation–is entirely dependant upon the willingness of other individuals whose success in procuring resources at that particular time is better than mine. (Assuming that we’re all roughly equal, such persons will surely exist). I need someone who will share with me.

So here I have two options.

1. I can steal from them. I might fail, in which case, I die. The person kills me or I starve or dehydrate or whatever. If I’m successful, great: Now I live. But now that person is likely to die, lacking the resources necessary for their survival. So I’m successful in the short-term, but in the long-term it is conceivable that I’ll need someone else’s resources again, and then I’ll die. Or there will be someone else to steal from, in which case I run the risk of dying. And if I’m successful the second time it will probably happen again. And again. Eventually I’m probably going to be unsuccessful, or run out of victims. Either way this path is a dead end. Eventually I’m going to be unable to procure resources for myself. Eventually one person will be left, having outcompeted everyone else or having stolen everything everyone else had. And then one day this person won’t be able to get what he needs to live, and he’ll die. There goes our society/population/species.

2. I could persuade the person to share what they have with me. This way we both live. The best way for me to do this would be to share what I have with them, for the promise that they will share with me when I need it. If I’m successful–if they actually do share with me (or vice versa)–both of our chances of survival are increased: Some days, I won’t be able to catch an antelope, but on that day maybe the other guy will. Or maybe neither of us will, in which case we should bring a third partner into it, and a fourth and a fifth, as many as our resource base can handle. If I fail, and instead of sharing back with me my exchange partner lets me die, then I’m dead. And in the future he won’t have someone to share resources with him, and he’ll die. And vice versa.

Therefore: The system of taking what you can for yourself is unsustainable. Eventually the competitors/thieves are going to have to 1) learn to work together or 2) die. Thus in a Hobbesian “state of nature”–no government, scarce resources, and general equality of mental/physical strength, mutual interdependence and reciprocal exchange will be the only viable survival strategy; the War of All Against All will in fact be impossible, since it leads eventually to the destruction of all. Since there are human beings on Earth, and in fact before the appearance of the state there were human beings almost everywhere on earth for hundreds or thousands of generations, we can conclude that it was 1) never a universal condition and 2) absolutely not the usual condition of humans unruled by a state (whom Hobbes points to as an example).

Then there’s the question of Glory. This one is the most easily dealt with: If there is greater glory or honor or power to be had by another means than killing your neighbor, and if killing your neighbor would, instead of being reinforced by prestige, be reinforced by insecurity at the loss of a trading partner necessary for your own survival; by the scorn or shunning or hatred of others; and by the possibility of retaliation; you’re far more likely to seek out other means of gaining glory. If there are no peaceful means such a person could be turned outward instead of inward, against opposing groups–that’s still War, but it’s not the war of all against all. If a person exists who absolutely cannot stop stealing from or killing from members of his own group, despite all pressure put on him, eventually he’s going to burn himself out (run out of victims) and die or himself be killed (openly or passively, by denying him resources). And if nothing else I really just don’t see how the possibility of a desire for personal glory on the part of some could lead to the WAR by itself (though it could lead to war by itself, just not Of All Against All.)

Ironically, the only situation I can imagine in which such a person could continue is in a circumstance of extremely abundant, non-fluctuating resources, i.e., the situation created by intensive agriculture and civilization.