The debate among the early modern political philosophers over the state of nature can be settled by modern evolutionary anthropology. Over the years, I have argued on this blog that this is an example of how evolutionary anthropology can clarify, and perhaps even resolve, disputes in the history of political philosophy.
Evolutionary anthropologists studying the evolution of war and peace have been divided into Hobbesians who believe that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were naturally violent and warlike and Rousseauans who believe that hunter-gatherers were naturally peaceful. But in setting up this debate as Hobbes versus Rousseau, they have overlooked the position of Locke. This is a serious mistake, because the weight of the evidence and argumentation on this issue today is on the side of Locke's account of the state of nature as a state of peace that tended to become a state of war. It seems now that while Hobbes was partly right and partly wrong about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.
As I have indicated in some previous posts, Azar Gat is one of the leading scholars defending the Hobbesian side of this debate and criticizing the Rousseauan side. He concedes, however, that Hobbes was wrong on some points, because he failed to see that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were social animals and not solitary individuals, and that they were capable of living in peace for long periods of time, despite their propensity to violence and war. Gat does not recognize that Locke was closer to the truth about the evolutionary state of nature than either Hobbes or Rousseau, and that the Hobbesians and Rousseauans today have been moving towards agreement on the Lockean account of the state of nature.
Gat elaborated his reasoning in his 2006 book War in Human Civilization (Oxford University Press). Now he has restated some of this reasoning and surveyed some of the most recent research in an article that has just been published--"Proving Communal Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers: The Quasi-Rousseauan Error," Evolutionary Anthropology, 24 (May/June, 2015): 111-126.
In this article, he shows that the Rousseauans have been retreating from Rousseau over the past 30 years, because the scientific evidence against the Rousseauan state of nature has been accumulating to the point that it cannot be ignored. He shows that the Rousseauans have moved through three positions.
First, they embraced Classical Rousseauism, which was Rousseau's original claim that human beings in the state of nature were totally peaceful, until the settlement into sedentary and agricultural life, which brought violent conflict.
Second, they adopted Extended Rousseauism, which claimed that serious violence did not arise until the emergence of centralized states. This position is associated with the "tribal zone theory," according to which simple hunter-gatherers and complex hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists did not become violent until they came into contact with intrusive states. So, for example, the Yanomamo people of the Amazonian rain forest, whom Napoleon Chagnon made famous as the "fierce people," were said by Brian Ferguson to show the effects of a century of violent conflicts with European invaders.
Finally, most recently, the Rousseauans have adopted a Quasi-Rousseauism that breaks totally with Rousseau, because they concede that hunter-gatherers in the state of nature show the violence of homicide and feuds, and yet the Rousseans insist that this violence is not war. Therefore, they can argue that war in the strict sense is not natural for human beings, but is a purely cultural invention of the states that began to appear around 5,000 years ago. The Quasi-Rousseauans include Raymond Kelly and Douglas Fry.
Gat argues that this Rousseauan retreat from Rousseau is in response to the growing evidence from primatology, archaeology, and ethnography that largely confirms Hobbes's claim that the state of nature is a state of war. As in his book, in surveying the evidence, Gat stresses the importance of Aboriginal Australia as the best natural laboratory for studying the hunter-gatherer way of life.
The primatological evidence includes the evidence for chimpanzee warfare, in which bands of adult male chimps belonging to one chimp community raid the territory of other communities, and if they have the numerical advantage over their opponents, the raiders attack or kill their opponents, and then the raiders return to their community, without suffering any injury to themselves. This kind of behavior is similar to what human hunter-gatherers do when they launch raids, often at night, into the territory of other groups and make surprise attacks on their opponents. Bonobos, however, do not show such violent behavior; and thus the Rousseauans look to the bonobos as their models for our primate ancestry.
The archaeological evidence includes skeletal evidence of injuries or lethal assaults from attacks, ancient weapons and shields, and signs of defensive fortifications.
The ethnographic evidence comes from reports of how hunter-gatherers have lived. Since preliterate people have no written records of their history, the only records we have come from European observers. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau relied on the reports of Europeans who first discovered foraging societies in Africa and the New World. The problem here, however, is the "contact paradox": we cannot know how these people have lived until we contact them, but then any contact can distort their behavior.
As Gat indicates, the Australian Aboriginals appear to be the only case where the contact paradox is minimized. Until the Europeans first arrived in Australian in 1785, Australia was an isolated continent of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes, with no pastoralists, agriculturalists, or states. The earliest English reports of how they lived showed a history of lethal feuds, raids, ambushes, with fighting between individuals, families, and tribes.
Gat shows that surveys of the evidence for violence and warfare among hunter-gatherers and prestate horticulturalists manifest rates of violent death as high as 25% of adult males and 15% of the adult population. These rates of violent death drop dramatically with the establishment of formal government and laws, thus showing the Hobbesian pacification of life under the Leviathan. Those rates have dropped even more in modern liberal states, as Steve Pinker and others have shown.
Oddly enough, the Quasi-Rousseauans agree that there really is a pattern of declining violence here. Their only disagreement is their insistence that the violence in the state of nature is personal violence--homicide and feuding--that does not satisfy any proper definition of war. Gat responds to this by arguing that Hobbes and Rousseau saw "war" as including any kind of violence, and by arguing that there is evidence for large group-against-group conflicts among hunter-gatherers (such as the Australian Aboriginals) that should count as war.
The emotional intensity of this debate over the evolution of war is explained by Gat as reflecting the false assumption that if we see war as a natural evolutionary adaptation, then we must conclude that the pursuit of peace is a futile denial of human nature. Gat denies this by arguing that while war is a naturally evolved capacity, it is not a biologically determined necessity. We have evolved capacities for both peace and war, and whether we have war or peace depends upon the ecological and cultural circumstances of life. If we understand this, we can look for ways to make peaceful cooperation more likely and violent conflict less likely.
In all of this, Gat is implicitly taking Locke's position. Locke's state of nature is a state of peace, because human beings are naturally social animals--bound together by familial, tribal, and cultural bonds--who engage in mutually beneficial cooperation, which shows how human beings with natural reason can grasp a natural moral law, and enforce that law with the natural disposition to punish offenders. And yet, Locke's state of nature can easily become a state of war, because where everyone has the natural power to punish offenses against the natural law, with individuals tending to be partial to their own interests, people tend to fall into endless feuding and raiding. To escape from that natural state of war, the establishment of government and law, so that there is a common judge to settle disputes under the rule of law, can provide the conditions of peace. Nevertheless, when those with governmental power rule arbitrarily and absolutely for their own interests and against the public interest, then the people can reclaim their "natural executive power of the state of nature" in resisting that tyrannical rule.
As the rhetoric of Lockean liberalism succeeds in promoting the ideas of government by the consent of the governed directed to securing individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, we see ever declining violence and the spread of the liberal peace, as described by Gat, Pinker, and others.
I have developed these points in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query war Hobbes Rousseau Locke. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query war Hobbes Rousseau Locke. Sort by date Show all posts
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Sapolsky on the State of Nature: Hobbes or Rousseau? Why Not Locke?
The question of whether the original state of nature for human beings in foraging bands was a state of war or a state of peace has been a contentious question in the history of political philosophy, beginning with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. This continues today to be one of the most intensely debated questions in the social and biological sciences, with some people (such as Richard Wrangham, Azar Gat, and Steven Pinker) adopting the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as a state of war, and others (such as Douglas Fry, Brian Ferguson, and Robert Sussman) adopting the Rousseauian view of the state of nature as a state of peace. Remarkably, however, these folks never recognize the Lockean alternative--that the state of nature is predominantly a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war--even though they often end up agreeing implicitly with this Lockean view.
Weighing the evidence and arguments in this debate supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right. I have argued for this assessment in various posts (here, here, and here).
It is surprising to see how this modern debate repeats the same pattern over and over again. First, it's assumed that the only choice is between Hobbes and Rousseau. Then, some people try to argue for the Hobbesian position, and others try to argue for the Rousseauian position. And yet, eventually most agree that neither extreme position is completely right. But they cannot recognize the Lockean position as superior to both, because they haven't thought about Locke's argument, or how the evidence gathered by modern scientists might confirm what Locke says.
So, for example, much of the debate over the past 20 years was initiated by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996). He frames the debate as a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau (5-32). And, as the subtitle of his book indicates, he seems to take the side of Hobbes against Rousseau. But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it right: "If Rousseau's primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes's perpetual donnybrook is impossible" (178). And yet he never considers the possibility that the archaeological and anthropological evidence that he surveys in his book could be seen as supporting Locke's position as mostly right.
One can see the same pattern repeated in the debate sparked by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). In a report on this debate in Science, the author says that the debate is rooted in the dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau; and he identifies some scholars as Hobbesians and others as Rousseauians (Andrew Lawler, "The Battle Over Violence," Science 336 [2012]: 829-30). But then he reports that most scholars agree that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau are completely right. "They do not argue for a Rousseauian perspective. But that doesn't mean they're ready to embrace a Hobbesian view, either" (830). The reader is left wondering whether there is some third alternative that is closer to the truth.
I see this pattern again in Robert Sapolsky's new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). Sapolsky is a primatologist (particularly, a baboonologist) and neuroscientist at Stanford University, who is famous on the Stanford campus for his popular lecture courses, and also famous around the world for his lectures on YouTube from his course "Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology" that have attracted over a million views.
I first heard him lecture at Stanford in 1988 when I was auditing courses in the Program in Human Biology. Now, in his new book, we have a massive (790 pages in small print!) magnum opus that brings together much of his thinking from that human behavioral biology course. The book also has the casual hipster wit that makes his lecturing so engaging for students.
Sapolsky's book is a comprehensive textbook surveying all of the work over the past forty years--since the publication in 1975 of E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology--on the biological bases of social behavior. Like his teacher Melvin Konner, Sapolsky explains behavior as arising from a complicated interaction of many biological, psychological, and cultural factors, in which every single factor exercises some causal power only in the context of all the other factors. He is particularly interested in explaining social cooperation (humans at our best) and violent aggression (humans at our worst).
Explaining the deep evolutionary roots of human violence leads him into the debate over whether warfare is rooted in the evolved human nature of our ancient nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, or whether war is a relatively recent cultural invention that began only a few thousand years ago when human beings moved into sedentary agricultural societies ruled by militaristic states.
Here he follows the recurrent pattern in this debate that I have just sketched. He says the debate is "Hobbes-versus-Rousseau" (305-27). He generally takes the side of the Rousseauians--particularly, Douglas Fry--in criticizing the Hobbesians (Keeley, Pinker, Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon, and others). And he tells the story of how a baboon troop that he studied in Kenya experienced a change in their social culture, so that they became less aggressive and more peaceful, less Hobbesian and more Rousseauian, which shows the cultural flexibility emphasized by the Rousseauians. But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it completely right. "So, Hobbes or Rousseau? Well, a mixture of the two, I say unhelpfully" (325). He never mentions Locke or considers whether a Lockean account of the state of nature might be best.
In reviewing Sapolsky's book for the New York Times Book Review, Richard Wrangham generally praised the book. But he also criticized Sapolsky for becoming a "partisan critic" in his account of the Hobbes-versus-Rousseau debate over the evolution of human violence. Sapolsky's Rousseauian partisanship is subtle in that it depends mostly on his remaining silent about evidence and argumentation that contradict the Rousseauian claims. For example, he endorses Marshall Sahlins' claim that nomadic hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent society" (317-18). But he is silent about the anthropologists who have shown that Sahlins' argument is not supported by the evidence, which I have indicated in a previous post.
Similarly, Sapolsky relies on the research of Douglas Fry to support the conclusion that nomadic hunter-gatherers have always been peaceful (322). But Sapolsky is silent about the many criticisms of Fry's reasoning, which I have surveyed in a previous post. For example, Fry has failed to recognize that many of the modern hunter-gatherer bands that he has identified as peaceful have been surrounded by militarily superior farmers, and so it's hardly surprising that the hunter-gatherers have not gone to war in such circumstances.
Sapolsky says that there is no archaeological evidence for warfare among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. There is, however, one recently discovered site in northern Kenya dated at around 10,000 years ago that had the skeletons of 27 people killed in a massacre. Sapolsky says that this is not evidence for ancient warfare among nomadic hunter-gatherers, because the victims here seem to have been sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were living along the shoreline of Lake Turkana, where there was probably abundant fish and game animals; and so the attackers wanted to steal this "prime beachfront property" (321).
Sapolsky does not tell the reader that the discoverers of this site could not agree on this. As I indicated in a previous post, one member of the team accepted the interpretation repeated by Sapolsky--that this is evidence for ancient warfare arising among sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were no longer living a nomadic life. But another member of the team had a different interpretation. She said that while there is lots of evidence of warfare "among settled, sedentary communities," the discovery in Nataruk is the first "archaeological record of armed conflict between early nomadic hunter-gather groups." She suggested that the foragers who were massacred had not established a settlement on the lake, but rather they were a "small traveling band of hunter-gatherers who stopped by a lagoon to hunt or fish." And so, she seemed to adopt the Hobbesian interpretation of this archaeological discovery as confirming that warfare was prevalent among our earliest foraging ancestors, and thus deeply rooted in our evolved human nature.
But no matter which interpretation one accepts, this confirms Locke's claim that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a state of peace that easily became a state of war whenever there was any resource worth fighting over--like a good fishing spot.
Sapolsky seems to agree with this when he says that even purely nomadic hunter-gatherers "are no tie-dyed pacifists," because they often engage in lethal violence (323). If so, then Sapolsky's account of the state of nature is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauian but Lockean.
But what about Sapolsky's baboons, who showed, he argued, that even if their evolved nature is Hobbesian, they can develop a social culture that taps into their "inner Rousseau"? I have written a post on Sapolsky's earlier reports of this in 2004 and 2013. In his new book, he emphasizes the great "flexibility" and "social plasticity" that this shows in baboon life, which sounds like what Rousseau identified as the "perfectibility" of human ancestors, so that nature put no limits on how far human beings could be transformed by cultural history.
In the earlier reports, however, Sapolsky suggested that baboon "perfectibility" is not unlimited. The changes brought by cultural history are "within the limits of baboon sociality," and the new culture of Forest Troop did not bring "an unrecognizably different utopia." There was still a dominance hierarchy. There was still displacement aggression, although it had been reduced. And while the rate of reconciliations had increased, the need for reconciliations showed the persistence of conflict. Sapolsky even indicated that the overall rate of aggressive conflict in Forest Troop was similar to other troops. So despite the cultural malleability shown here, "there are not infinite amounts of social plasticity in a primate social system."
I have argued that we see three levels of social order in these baboons--baboon nature, baboon culture, and baboon individuals. The repertoire of social behavior characteristic of a baboon species sets the natural limits of baboon sociality. This baboon nature constrains but does not determine baboon culture. And, finally, nature and culture constrain but do not determine individual behavior.
I will be writing more posts on Sapolsky's book.
Weighing the evidence and arguments in this debate supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right. I have argued for this assessment in various posts (here, here, and here).
It is surprising to see how this modern debate repeats the same pattern over and over again. First, it's assumed that the only choice is between Hobbes and Rousseau. Then, some people try to argue for the Hobbesian position, and others try to argue for the Rousseauian position. And yet, eventually most agree that neither extreme position is completely right. But they cannot recognize the Lockean position as superior to both, because they haven't thought about Locke's argument, or how the evidence gathered by modern scientists might confirm what Locke says.
So, for example, much of the debate over the past 20 years was initiated by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996). He frames the debate as a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau (5-32). And, as the subtitle of his book indicates, he seems to take the side of Hobbes against Rousseau. But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it right: "If Rousseau's primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes's perpetual donnybrook is impossible" (178). And yet he never considers the possibility that the archaeological and anthropological evidence that he surveys in his book could be seen as supporting Locke's position as mostly right.
One can see the same pattern repeated in the debate sparked by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). In a report on this debate in Science, the author says that the debate is rooted in the dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau; and he identifies some scholars as Hobbesians and others as Rousseauians (Andrew Lawler, "The Battle Over Violence," Science 336 [2012]: 829-30). But then he reports that most scholars agree that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau are completely right. "They do not argue for a Rousseauian perspective. But that doesn't mean they're ready to embrace a Hobbesian view, either" (830). The reader is left wondering whether there is some third alternative that is closer to the truth.
I see this pattern again in Robert Sapolsky's new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). Sapolsky is a primatologist (particularly, a baboonologist) and neuroscientist at Stanford University, who is famous on the Stanford campus for his popular lecture courses, and also famous around the world for his lectures on YouTube from his course "Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology" that have attracted over a million views.
I first heard him lecture at Stanford in 1988 when I was auditing courses in the Program in Human Biology. Now, in his new book, we have a massive (790 pages in small print!) magnum opus that brings together much of his thinking from that human behavioral biology course. The book also has the casual hipster wit that makes his lecturing so engaging for students.
Sapolsky's book is a comprehensive textbook surveying all of the work over the past forty years--since the publication in 1975 of E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology--on the biological bases of social behavior. Like his teacher Melvin Konner, Sapolsky explains behavior as arising from a complicated interaction of many biological, psychological, and cultural factors, in which every single factor exercises some causal power only in the context of all the other factors. He is particularly interested in explaining social cooperation (humans at our best) and violent aggression (humans at our worst).
Explaining the deep evolutionary roots of human violence leads him into the debate over whether warfare is rooted in the evolved human nature of our ancient nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, or whether war is a relatively recent cultural invention that began only a few thousand years ago when human beings moved into sedentary agricultural societies ruled by militaristic states.
Here he follows the recurrent pattern in this debate that I have just sketched. He says the debate is "Hobbes-versus-Rousseau" (305-27). He generally takes the side of the Rousseauians--particularly, Douglas Fry--in criticizing the Hobbesians (Keeley, Pinker, Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon, and others). And he tells the story of how a baboon troop that he studied in Kenya experienced a change in their social culture, so that they became less aggressive and more peaceful, less Hobbesian and more Rousseauian, which shows the cultural flexibility emphasized by the Rousseauians. But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it completely right. "So, Hobbes or Rousseau? Well, a mixture of the two, I say unhelpfully" (325). He never mentions Locke or considers whether a Lockean account of the state of nature might be best.
In reviewing Sapolsky's book for the New York Times Book Review, Richard Wrangham generally praised the book. But he also criticized Sapolsky for becoming a "partisan critic" in his account of the Hobbes-versus-Rousseau debate over the evolution of human violence. Sapolsky's Rousseauian partisanship is subtle in that it depends mostly on his remaining silent about evidence and argumentation that contradict the Rousseauian claims. For example, he endorses Marshall Sahlins' claim that nomadic hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent society" (317-18). But he is silent about the anthropologists who have shown that Sahlins' argument is not supported by the evidence, which I have indicated in a previous post.
Similarly, Sapolsky relies on the research of Douglas Fry to support the conclusion that nomadic hunter-gatherers have always been peaceful (322). But Sapolsky is silent about the many criticisms of Fry's reasoning, which I have surveyed in a previous post. For example, Fry has failed to recognize that many of the modern hunter-gatherer bands that he has identified as peaceful have been surrounded by militarily superior farmers, and so it's hardly surprising that the hunter-gatherers have not gone to war in such circumstances.
Sapolsky says that there is no archaeological evidence for warfare among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. There is, however, one recently discovered site in northern Kenya dated at around 10,000 years ago that had the skeletons of 27 people killed in a massacre. Sapolsky says that this is not evidence for ancient warfare among nomadic hunter-gatherers, because the victims here seem to have been sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were living along the shoreline of Lake Turkana, where there was probably abundant fish and game animals; and so the attackers wanted to steal this "prime beachfront property" (321).
Sapolsky does not tell the reader that the discoverers of this site could not agree on this. As I indicated in a previous post, one member of the team accepted the interpretation repeated by Sapolsky--that this is evidence for ancient warfare arising among sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were no longer living a nomadic life. But another member of the team had a different interpretation. She said that while there is lots of evidence of warfare "among settled, sedentary communities," the discovery in Nataruk is the first "archaeological record of armed conflict between early nomadic hunter-gather groups." She suggested that the foragers who were massacred had not established a settlement on the lake, but rather they were a "small traveling band of hunter-gatherers who stopped by a lagoon to hunt or fish." And so, she seemed to adopt the Hobbesian interpretation of this archaeological discovery as confirming that warfare was prevalent among our earliest foraging ancestors, and thus deeply rooted in our evolved human nature.
But no matter which interpretation one accepts, this confirms Locke's claim that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a state of peace that easily became a state of war whenever there was any resource worth fighting over--like a good fishing spot.
Sapolsky seems to agree with this when he says that even purely nomadic hunter-gatherers "are no tie-dyed pacifists," because they often engage in lethal violence (323). If so, then Sapolsky's account of the state of nature is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauian but Lockean.
But what about Sapolsky's baboons, who showed, he argued, that even if their evolved nature is Hobbesian, they can develop a social culture that taps into their "inner Rousseau"? I have written a post on Sapolsky's earlier reports of this in 2004 and 2013. In his new book, he emphasizes the great "flexibility" and "social plasticity" that this shows in baboon life, which sounds like what Rousseau identified as the "perfectibility" of human ancestors, so that nature put no limits on how far human beings could be transformed by cultural history.
In the earlier reports, however, Sapolsky suggested that baboon "perfectibility" is not unlimited. The changes brought by cultural history are "within the limits of baboon sociality," and the new culture of Forest Troop did not bring "an unrecognizably different utopia." There was still a dominance hierarchy. There was still displacement aggression, although it had been reduced. And while the rate of reconciliations had increased, the need for reconciliations showed the persistence of conflict. Sapolsky even indicated that the overall rate of aggressive conflict in Forest Troop was similar to other troops. So despite the cultural malleability shown here, "there are not infinite amounts of social plasticity in a primate social system."
I have argued that we see three levels of social order in these baboons--baboon nature, baboon culture, and baboon individuals. The repertoire of social behavior characteristic of a baboon species sets the natural limits of baboon sociality. This baboon nature constrains but does not determine baboon culture. And, finally, nature and culture constrain but do not determine individual behavior.
I will be writing more posts on Sapolsky's book.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau: The Lockean Way in the Evolution of War and Peace
The recurrent debate over the evolution of war and peace is commonly framed as a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau. And yet the opponents in this debate end up agreeing on a position that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauean but Lockean. Thus does the evolutionary anthropology of war and peace confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of government.
In his editorial introduction to War, Peace, and Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2013), Douglas Fry adopts the argument of Marshall Sahlins (in The Western Illusion of Human Nature, 2008) that the study of war and peace is distorted by the bias in Western culture towards a Hobbesian view of human nature as innately violent. This bias is said to run throughout Western history--from Hesiod and Thucydides to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the American founders. Contemporary scientists like Edward O. Wilson, Azar Gat, Richard Wrangham, and Steven Pinker show this cultural bias in their claim that human beings have an evolved propensity to war and violence shaped in the ancient history of their hunter-gatherer ancestors. By contrast, Fry says, those who can free themselves from this Hobbesian cultural bias can see that the scientific evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and primatology proves conclusively that war was not natural for our nomadic foraging ancestors, and that war first arose as a cultural invention less than 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture, dominance hierarchies, and centralized states.
One obvious question about Fry's argument is how he and a few others like Sahlins were able to break out of the Hobbesian bias of Western culture. When Sahlins first stated this argument in 1976--in The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology--he said that his liberation from the Hobbesian bias came from his understanding of the modern anthropological concept of culture, which was first stated by Rousseau. "Rousseau justifies the title some would give him as the true ancestor of anthropology by arguing the status of war as a phenomenon of cultural nature--precisely against the Hobbesian view of a war of every man against every man grounded in human nature" (8-9).
Even when he did not explicitly acknowledge Rousseau's influence, Sahlins embraced a Rousseauean view of human evolutionary history. This is evident, for example, in his famous essay on "The Original Affluent Society" (published in Stone Age Economics, 1972). Sahlins explains that in a hunting-gathering society, the means for satisfying wants are limited, but the wants themselves are also limited. Unlike the modern bourgeois, whose wants are always greater than the means for satisfying them, savages can fulfill their limited material needs easily and thus have plenty of leisure. "We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free" (14). Moreover, they are free from domination, because their rough equality of wealth prevents any subordination of the poor to the rich. There is no war. And they have a rich social life organized around family and kinship. In contrast to the selfish competitiveness of bourgeois society, this hunter-gatherer society is a "kinship community" of sharing and mutual aid. This corresponds to the second stage of human evolution in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, the stage of "nascent society" that comes with the emergence of family life. Rousseau pronounces it "the happiest and most durable epoch," and generally "the best for man" (Masters ed., 146-47, 151).
In Fry's edited volume, Darcia Narvaez restates Sahlins' argument for the life of Rousseauean hunter-gatherers as superior to the life of Hobbesian bourgeois society. While hunter-gatherers are virtuous, cooperative, generous, and egalitarian, she claims, the people in bourgeois societies like the United States are vicious, competitive, selfish, and hierarchical. She also explains that hunter-gatherers are superior in their "sense of Spirit," their "higher consciousness," and their "right-brain holistic orientation" (343, 354).
According to Locke, the original state of nature was a state of peace that easily became a state of war. A state of nature exists whenever human beings live without a common superior with authority to settle disputes among them. Insofar as they can live together according to customary norms of fairness as judged by ordinary reasoning, this is a state of peace. But when some individuals exercise force without right against others, this becomes a state of war. In the state of nature, each person has the "executive power of the law of nature," which is the power of each person to punish those who injure them, and thus each person takes the law into his own hands. The state of nature can be a state of peace when all or most people agree on the customary rules of behavior as enforced by informal mediation and arbitration. But it becomes a state of war when it falls into a cycle of revenge and feuding in which life, liberty, and property are so insecure that people seek out some formal system of law and government to keep the peace (ST, 6-14, 123-31).
The state of nature is a social state because all human beings must begin their lives as children dependent on parental care. Sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental care constitute the family as a natural social unit securing survival and reproduction. And thus kinship becomes the primary social bond and the source of social authority (FT, 86-89; ST, 52-84).
In the original state of nature, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals (ST, 26-31). This hunting-gathering way of life prevailed for most of human history until the development of agriculture and pastoralism, so that human beings began cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals. This agrarian way of life provided the conditions for a sedentary existence with a growing human population and the emergence of formal governmental rule (ST, 32-38).
Locke thought that the original hunting-gathering way of life could be seen among the most primitive of the American Indian bands. "In the beginning, all the world was America," and thus this was "a pattern of the first ages" (ST, 14, 49, 108).
Locke agreed with Hobbes that a centralized state was necessary to adjudicate disputes in a way that would overcome the tendency to feuding when each person is the judge and executioner in his own case. But Locke also saw the tendency for the power of the centralized state being abused by rulers for the exploitation of the ruled. And thus he sought ways to limit the power of government to securing the conditions for peaceful cooperation to emerge as a largely self-regulating order in civil society. This would combine the individual liberty that had been enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and the high civilization that had been made possible by an agrarian and commercial economy.
In the current debate over the evolution of war, it seems to me that the opposing sides can agree on most of this Lockean account of human social evolution.
First, they can agree that Hobbes and Rousseau were wrong in depicting the original condition of human beings as a totally solitary state, because even the most primitive hunter-gatherers live in families and kinship groups that enforce informal customary norms of good behavior. Rousseaueans like Sahlins prefer to start with what Rousseau thought was the second stage of human evolution--the "nascent society" of family life--and thus they reject Rousseau's conception of the first stage as a condition of solitary animals with no social ties, and they accept Locke's account of family as the "first society." Human beings are naturally social animals who began their evolutionary history living in families and in local and regional groups bound together by ties of kinship, language, and culture.
The second point of agreement is that Locke and Hobbes were right about the need for government to secure peace through the formal rule of law. This is what Steven Pinker identifies as the "Hobbesian pacification," which is the first step in the history of declining violence. Fry and others who seem to be critics of Pinker agree with him about this. For example, Fry agrees that while hunter-gatherers can maintain some social order through "self-redress"--"taking justice into one's own hands"--this tends towards uncontrolled feuding and raiding that makes it desirable to have a rule of law imposed by government (see Fry's Beyond War, 90-99, 223-26). (What Fry calls "self-redress" corresponds to what Locke calls "the executive power of the state of nature.") Governance is better than anarchy. People in stateless societies with high rates of violence--like the Waorani and the Yanomamo--can see "the potential of police, courts, and a code of law for achieving justice without raiding and revenge killings" (223). L
The third point of agreement is that our evolved human nature is neither basically violent nor basically peaceful, because that human nature contains mixed motives, and the expression of those motives depends on the circumstances of life. As Pinker says, "human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that--under the right circumstances--impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason" (483). Thus, Pinker declares: "violent tendencies are not hydraulic but strategic, deployed only in circumstances in which the potential gains are high and the risks are low" (37). Robert Sussman agrees with this. "I am not trying to ignore the role of aggression and competition in understanding primate and human social interactions," he declares. "We are all aware that humans are capable of warfare and violence; it is a part of our behavioral repertoire, part of the human behavioral totipotentiality. Thus, of course, it is part of our biology and our inheritance, just as is peaceful behavior and the ability to love" (in War, Peace, and Human Nature, 108). Both Sussman (97) and Pinker (619-20) agree in rejecting the idea of a "warrior gene." They agree that the expression of violence depends upon the circumstances in which human beings act. Fry agrees with Richard Wrangham and Pinker that males tend to be more violent than females, but that the expression of this male propensity to violence is flexible in being open to environmental or cultural influence (Fry, Beyond War, 166-74; Wrangham and Peterson, Demonic Males, 231-58).
This openness to environmental or cultural influence has made it possible over the past few centuries for the growth in Lockean liberal culture to produce declining violence in all the ways studied by Pinker in his Better Angels of Our Nature. The Rousseauean critics of Pinker seem to agree with him about this modern liberal culture of declining violence, and thus they disagree with Rousseau's pessimism about the degrading effects of bourgeois liberalism. The only disagreement is that the Rousseauean critics see this declining violence as an n-shaped curve: no war at all over human history during the foraging era, a spike in war beginning 10,000 years ago, and then a recent drop in war (Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 15-16).
The fourth point of agreement among those debating the evolution of war is that "complex" warfare is not a natural adaptation but a cultural invention that began about 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture and settled societies. In his lecture at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the Galapagos, Wrangham gave the following explanation of the difference between "simple" and "complex" warfare:
But now we see the one big disagreement in the recent debates. Like Hobbes and Locke, Wrangham and Pinker identify feuding and raiding among hunter-gatherers as war, even if a "simple" kind of war. But their Rousseauean critics deny that this counts as war at all. Fry agrees that nomadic foragers show lethal violence, but he argues that the "personal nature" of this violence means that such violence cannot be identified as war. He explains: "The targets of homicide attempts are rarely randomly chosen members of other groups. They are offenders who have committed specific misdeeds or acts of abuse" (War, Peace, and Human Nature, 11).
Notice, however, that despite this disagreement over how exactly to distinguish murder from warfare, there is agreement that hunter-gatherer societies can show high rates of homicidal violence from feuding. For Locke, it is this very tendency to violent feuding that turns the state of nature from a state of peace into a state of war.
In his editorial introduction to War, Peace, and Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2013), Douglas Fry adopts the argument of Marshall Sahlins (in The Western Illusion of Human Nature, 2008) that the study of war and peace is distorted by the bias in Western culture towards a Hobbesian view of human nature as innately violent. This bias is said to run throughout Western history--from Hesiod and Thucydides to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the American founders. Contemporary scientists like Edward O. Wilson, Azar Gat, Richard Wrangham, and Steven Pinker show this cultural bias in their claim that human beings have an evolved propensity to war and violence shaped in the ancient history of their hunter-gatherer ancestors. By contrast, Fry says, those who can free themselves from this Hobbesian cultural bias can see that the scientific evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and primatology proves conclusively that war was not natural for our nomadic foraging ancestors, and that war first arose as a cultural invention less than 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture, dominance hierarchies, and centralized states.
One obvious question about Fry's argument is how he and a few others like Sahlins were able to break out of the Hobbesian bias of Western culture. When Sahlins first stated this argument in 1976--in The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology--he said that his liberation from the Hobbesian bias came from his understanding of the modern anthropological concept of culture, which was first stated by Rousseau. "Rousseau justifies the title some would give him as the true ancestor of anthropology by arguing the status of war as a phenomenon of cultural nature--precisely against the Hobbesian view of a war of every man against every man grounded in human nature" (8-9).
Even when he did not explicitly acknowledge Rousseau's influence, Sahlins embraced a Rousseauean view of human evolutionary history. This is evident, for example, in his famous essay on "The Original Affluent Society" (published in Stone Age Economics, 1972). Sahlins explains that in a hunting-gathering society, the means for satisfying wants are limited, but the wants themselves are also limited. Unlike the modern bourgeois, whose wants are always greater than the means for satisfying them, savages can fulfill their limited material needs easily and thus have plenty of leisure. "We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free" (14). Moreover, they are free from domination, because their rough equality of wealth prevents any subordination of the poor to the rich. There is no war. And they have a rich social life organized around family and kinship. In contrast to the selfish competitiveness of bourgeois society, this hunter-gatherer society is a "kinship community" of sharing and mutual aid. This corresponds to the second stage of human evolution in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, the stage of "nascent society" that comes with the emergence of family life. Rousseau pronounces it "the happiest and most durable epoch," and generally "the best for man" (Masters ed., 146-47, 151).
In Fry's edited volume, Darcia Narvaez restates Sahlins' argument for the life of Rousseauean hunter-gatherers as superior to the life of Hobbesian bourgeois society. While hunter-gatherers are virtuous, cooperative, generous, and egalitarian, she claims, the people in bourgeois societies like the United States are vicious, competitive, selfish, and hierarchical. She also explains that hunter-gatherers are superior in their "sense of Spirit," their "higher consciousness," and their "right-brain holistic orientation" (343, 354).
According to Locke, the original state of nature was a state of peace that easily became a state of war. A state of nature exists whenever human beings live without a common superior with authority to settle disputes among them. Insofar as they can live together according to customary norms of fairness as judged by ordinary reasoning, this is a state of peace. But when some individuals exercise force without right against others, this becomes a state of war. In the state of nature, each person has the "executive power of the law of nature," which is the power of each person to punish those who injure them, and thus each person takes the law into his own hands. The state of nature can be a state of peace when all or most people agree on the customary rules of behavior as enforced by informal mediation and arbitration. But it becomes a state of war when it falls into a cycle of revenge and feuding in which life, liberty, and property are so insecure that people seek out some formal system of law and government to keep the peace (ST, 6-14, 123-31).
The state of nature is a social state because all human beings must begin their lives as children dependent on parental care. Sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental care constitute the family as a natural social unit securing survival and reproduction. And thus kinship becomes the primary social bond and the source of social authority (FT, 86-89; ST, 52-84).
In the original state of nature, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals (ST, 26-31). This hunting-gathering way of life prevailed for most of human history until the development of agriculture and pastoralism, so that human beings began cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals. This agrarian way of life provided the conditions for a sedentary existence with a growing human population and the emergence of formal governmental rule (ST, 32-38).
Locke thought that the original hunting-gathering way of life could be seen among the most primitive of the American Indian bands. "In the beginning, all the world was America," and thus this was "a pattern of the first ages" (ST, 14, 49, 108).
Locke agreed with Hobbes that a centralized state was necessary to adjudicate disputes in a way that would overcome the tendency to feuding when each person is the judge and executioner in his own case. But Locke also saw the tendency for the power of the centralized state being abused by rulers for the exploitation of the ruled. And thus he sought ways to limit the power of government to securing the conditions for peaceful cooperation to emerge as a largely self-regulating order in civil society. This would combine the individual liberty that had been enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and the high civilization that had been made possible by an agrarian and commercial economy.
In the current debate over the evolution of war, it seems to me that the opposing sides can agree on most of this Lockean account of human social evolution.
First, they can agree that Hobbes and Rousseau were wrong in depicting the original condition of human beings as a totally solitary state, because even the most primitive hunter-gatherers live in families and kinship groups that enforce informal customary norms of good behavior. Rousseaueans like Sahlins prefer to start with what Rousseau thought was the second stage of human evolution--the "nascent society" of family life--and thus they reject Rousseau's conception of the first stage as a condition of solitary animals with no social ties, and they accept Locke's account of family as the "first society." Human beings are naturally social animals who began their evolutionary history living in families and in local and regional groups bound together by ties of kinship, language, and culture.
The second point of agreement is that Locke and Hobbes were right about the need for government to secure peace through the formal rule of law. This is what Steven Pinker identifies as the "Hobbesian pacification," which is the first step in the history of declining violence. Fry and others who seem to be critics of Pinker agree with him about this. For example, Fry agrees that while hunter-gatherers can maintain some social order through "self-redress"--"taking justice into one's own hands"--this tends towards uncontrolled feuding and raiding that makes it desirable to have a rule of law imposed by government (see Fry's Beyond War, 90-99, 223-26). (What Fry calls "self-redress" corresponds to what Locke calls "the executive power of the state of nature.") Governance is better than anarchy. People in stateless societies with high rates of violence--like the Waorani and the Yanomamo--can see "the potential of police, courts, and a code of law for achieving justice without raiding and revenge killings" (223). L
The third point of agreement is that our evolved human nature is neither basically violent nor basically peaceful, because that human nature contains mixed motives, and the expression of those motives depends on the circumstances of life. As Pinker says, "human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that--under the right circumstances--impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason" (483). Thus, Pinker declares: "violent tendencies are not hydraulic but strategic, deployed only in circumstances in which the potential gains are high and the risks are low" (37). Robert Sussman agrees with this. "I am not trying to ignore the role of aggression and competition in understanding primate and human social interactions," he declares. "We are all aware that humans are capable of warfare and violence; it is a part of our behavioral repertoire, part of the human behavioral totipotentiality. Thus, of course, it is part of our biology and our inheritance, just as is peaceful behavior and the ability to love" (in War, Peace, and Human Nature, 108). Both Sussman (97) and Pinker (619-20) agree in rejecting the idea of a "warrior gene." They agree that the expression of violence depends upon the circumstances in which human beings act. Fry agrees with Richard Wrangham and Pinker that males tend to be more violent than females, but that the expression of this male propensity to violence is flexible in being open to environmental or cultural influence (Fry, Beyond War, 166-74; Wrangham and Peterson, Demonic Males, 231-58).
This openness to environmental or cultural influence has made it possible over the past few centuries for the growth in Lockean liberal culture to produce declining violence in all the ways studied by Pinker in his Better Angels of Our Nature. The Rousseauean critics of Pinker seem to agree with him about this modern liberal culture of declining violence, and thus they disagree with Rousseau's pessimism about the degrading effects of bourgeois liberalism. The only disagreement is that the Rousseauean critics see this declining violence as an n-shaped curve: no war at all over human history during the foraging era, a spike in war beginning 10,000 years ago, and then a recent drop in war (Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 15-16).
The fourth point of agreement among those debating the evolution of war is that "complex" warfare is not a natural adaptation but a cultural invention that began about 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture and settled societies. In his lecture at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the Galapagos, Wrangham gave the following explanation of the difference between "simple" and "complex" warfare:
"The major difficulty in identifying warfare from skeletal remains is that war includes two styles of military practice, only one of which can be recognized archaeologically. In terms of fighting, the distinction is between complex and simple warfare: complex warfare regularly includes battles (escalated conflicts between committed opponents), whereas simple warfare is largely confined to surprise attacks such as raiding. In terms of social organization, the distinction is between hierarchy and acephaly (lack of formal leadership)."
"A society that practices complex warfare and battles, and has a military hierarchy, is said to have 'true warfare' or to lie above the military horizon (Turney-High 1949). In this system, soldiers fight under orders from leaders and battles are frequently lethal. The result of a specific encounter can thus be a large number of deaths on both sides, which (especially when combined with metal weapons) is easily detected archaeologically. Such battle evidence currently goes back to about 8,000 BC in the Middle East (Qermez Dere, Iraq, Ferguson 2006). True warfare is therefore normally thought to begin within a few hundred years of the origin of agriculture 10,000 years ago, resulting from the development of hierarchically organized states."
"'Simple warfare,' by contrast, is practiced by small-scale acephalous hunter-gatherer and farmer societies whose warriors fight voluntarily, and whose communities are not integrated with each other by any political officials. It consists mainly of raiding and feuding. Simple warfare tends not to include battles, but when battles occur they normally stop after a few deaths. Massacres can occur when one side has a massive power advantage, such as burning a hut full of opponents, but the majority of deaths in simple warfare occur when raiders kill victims in a surprise attack. Raids often kill very few victims, such as only one, followed by the aggressors immediately making a rapid and complete retreat in order to avoid the risk of being confronted. The fact that in simple warfare most deaths occur in very small numbers explains the difficulty of distinguishing archaeologically between murder and war." (4-5)
But now we see the one big disagreement in the recent debates. Like Hobbes and Locke, Wrangham and Pinker identify feuding and raiding among hunter-gatherers as war, even if a "simple" kind of war. But their Rousseauean critics deny that this counts as war at all. Fry agrees that nomadic foragers show lethal violence, but he argues that the "personal nature" of this violence means that such violence cannot be identified as war. He explains: "The targets of homicide attempts are rarely randomly chosen members of other groups. They are offenders who have committed specific misdeeds or acts of abuse" (War, Peace, and Human Nature, 11).
Notice, however, that despite this disagreement over how exactly to distinguish murder from warfare, there is agreement that hunter-gatherer societies can show high rates of homicidal violence from feuding. For Locke, it is this very tendency to violent feuding that turns the state of nature from a state of peace into a state of war.
Friday, August 10, 2018
War and the Lockean State of Nature in Aboriginal Australia
During my recent travels in Australia (Brisbane and Sydney) and New Zealand (Wellington and Auckland), I thought about how those countries have been two natural laboratories of human evolution.
New Zealand was the last major land mass to be settled by human beings. There were no human beings in New Zealand prior to about 1300 AD, when the Polynesian ancestors of the Maori people navigated their way to those islands. The Maoris were preliterate people living in tribal chiefdoms without a state. The first brief European contact occurred in 1642 when two Dutch ships under the command of Abel Tasman sailed to Golden Bay at the top of the South Island. After a skirmish with some local Maori attacking in their canoes, Tasman sailed away without landing and never returned. In 1769, James Cook, on the first of his three voyages around the world, became the first European to land on New Zealand and establish contact with the Maoris, who lived as independent tribes, often at war with one another, although they were also bound together by trading networks. Beginning with Cook, the British and Maori established a barter trade. I will return to this evolutionary history of New Zealand in a future post.
In contrast to the recent human settlement of New Zealand, the first human settlers of Australia arrived over 50,000 years ago, probably crossing a land bridge with what is now New Guinea. Until James Cook's mapping of Australia's east coast in 1770 and the first British establishment of a penal settlement in Sydney in 1788, Australia was an isolated continent of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers--with no agriculturalists, pastoralists, or states. When the Europeans arrived, they found a continent of over 300 tribes of hunter-gatherers. This was a perfect laboratory for the study of human evolution as hunter-gatherers, which constituted over 90% of human evolutionary history, and which can be identified as our evolutionary state of nature. To resolve the debate among political philosophers--such as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau--over the state of nature, the study of Aboriginal Australia should be crucial.
Since human beings in the state of nature--like the Aboriginals of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand--have been preliterate people, they have left no written records of their history. Anthropologists from literate societies have tried to write the history of these "prehistoric" people through the ethnographic field research study of hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into recent centuries. But this creates the "contact paradox"--to study hunter-gatherers we must contact them, but this contact changes them from what they were before contact. By the time anthropologists write their ethnographic reports, the hunter-gatherers have been influenced by their contact with agriculturalists and state societies.
The study of Aboriginal Australia minimizes this contact problem, because the purely hunting-gathering way of life of the Aboriginals was isolated from the rest of the world for over 50,000 years, and consequently whatever the Europeans saw in Australia during their first contact can be considered perhaps the best picture of our evolutionary state of nature. Hobbes and Locke thought the European reports about the American Indians might be the best account of the state of nature--"In the beginning, all the world was America," as Locke said. But the European discovery of Australia might be even better--In the beginning, all the world was Australia.
Azar Gat has made that argument in claiming that the evidence for warfare in Aboriginal Australia refutes the assertion of Rousseauian anthropologists that the state of nature was perfectly peaceful and that war was a late cultural invention coming only after the adoption of agriculture and the state. Some of the best evidence for Aboriginal warfare in Australia comes from William Buckley (1780-1856). Buckley was brought to Australia in 1803 as a convict on a convict ship that established a settlement at Port Philip (now Melbourne). He escaped shortly afterwards, and for 32 years he lived with an Aboriginal tribe--the Wallarranga. He learned their language, married one of their women, and joined in all of their activities. In 1835, he returned to the white settler community. For a few years, he worked as an interpreter and mediator for the English in dealing with the Aboriginals. He then moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where he lived for the rest of his life. He told his life story to John Morgan, a Tasmanian newspaper editor, who wrote The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, published in 1852. Although some people have questioned the accuracy of his stories, some anthropologists who have studied the Australian Aboriginals have said that his account of life with the Wallarranga seems quite accurate.
Buckley describes many lethal feuds, raids, and ambushes among the Aboriginal tribes. The most common cause of the conflicts was disputes over women and retaliatory vengeance. He describes their weapons of war--clubs, spears, boomerangs, and shields. Remarkably, there were no bows in Aboriginal Australia. He also relates his observations of cannibalism.
Buckley reports that a typical tribe was composed of 20 to 60 families. Some people--such as skilled hunters and warriors--had high social status, and leading men could have more wives. But "they acknowledge no particular Chief as being superior to the rest" (86), which distinguishes them as pure hunter-gatherers unlike the chiefdoms of the Maori.
Here's one example of Buckley's reporting of warfare. He describes his tribe meeting about 300 members of the hostile Waarengbadawa tribe:
In response to this evidence for lethal violence among the Aboriginal Australians, some Rousseauian anthropologists like Douglas Fry have argued while this shows that hunter-gatherers engaged in homicide, this is purely personal violence that is not really war. Gat identifies these anthropologists as "Quasi-Rousseauians," because they have given up on Rousseau's claim that hunter-gatherers were perfectly peaceful. But even this modified Rousseauism fails, because much of the violence that Buckley describes includes battles between tribes that clearly qualifies as warfare, because he relates battles involving hundreds of people. Of course, if one defines war in such a narrow way, as Fry does, so that raiding, ambush, and feuding are not defined as war, then forager conflict is not war. But if one defines war as lethal conflict between independent societies, as Steven LeBlanc (2014) does, then the Australian Aborigines certainly engaged in war. As Buckley indicated in the passage above, he had fought as a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and he compared his experience in a European war with the warfare he saw in Australia.
Thus, as Gat concludes, the evidence of Aboriginal Australia seems to show that Hobbes was right about the state of nature being a state of war, and therefore Rousseau was wrong. But the evidence also shows that Hobbes was wrong in claiming that life in the state of nature was a perpetual war with no peaceful cooperation. In fact, Buckley and others have reported that the Aboriginal Australians lived in communities with norms of peaceful cooperation that included intertribal cooperation such as networks of trade. And they sometimes had long periods without intertribal war.
Like many of the social scientists involved in this debate over the evolution of war, Gat assumes that the debate is between two alternatives, represented by Hobbes and Rousseau, and he ignores Locke as taking a third position. Consequently, he fails to see that the evidence supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right. Locke was right to see that the state of nature is a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war: establishing government can therefore have a pacifying effect through the rule of law to settle disputes that easily become violent feuds in the state of nature.
In his new book The Causes of War and The Spread of Peace, Gat comes close to recognizing that the evidence from Aboriginal Australia sustains Locke's account of the state of nature. Gat says that Locke's "more balanced depiction of pre-state as compared to state societies was suggestive" (39). Oddly, however, Gat says that "Locke, like Hobbes and Rousseau, was not a researcher of the past but a political philosopher defending a particular political creed. His interest was the present." Gat does not notice that Locke, like Hobbes and Rousseau, studied the earliest ethnographic reports about hunter-gatherers as evidence for the state of nature.
Some of my earlier posts on Gat can be found here and here.
The same ethnographic and archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer warfare in Aboriginal Australia has been found around the world--including Europe, North America, South America, and New Guinea (Allen and Jones 2014). This supports the conclusion that hunter-gatherers both simple and complex have engaged in socially sanctioned lethal conflict between independent societies, and that this long evolutionary history of warfare can be traced back to early hominins. This shows that human beings have an innate propensity to warfare shared with chimpanzees (Wrangham and Peterson 1996; Wrangham and Glowacki 2012), although human beings can also choose not to act on that innate propensity, particularly when their lives have been shaped by a Lockean liberal culture that favors declining violence.
Posts on the "chimpanzee model" for the evolution of war can be found here, here, and here.
REFERENCES
Allen, Mark W., and Terry L. Jones, eds. 2014. Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers. London: Routledge.
Allen, Mark W. 2014. "Hunter-Gatherer Violence and Warfare in Australia." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 97-111.
Gat, Azar. 2017. The Causes of War and The Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LeBlanc, Steven. 2014. "Forager Warfare and Our Evolutionary Past." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 26-46.
Morgan, John. 2002 (orig. 1852). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley. Ed. Tim Flannery. Melbourne, Australia: The Text Publishing Company.
Pardoe, Colin. 2014. "Conflict and Territoriality in Aboriginal Australia: Evidence from Biology and Ethnography." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 112-132.
Wrangham, Richard, and Dale Peterson. 1996. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Wrangham, Richard, and Luke Glowacki. 2012. "Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model." Human Nature 23:5-29.
New Zealand was the last major land mass to be settled by human beings. There were no human beings in New Zealand prior to about 1300 AD, when the Polynesian ancestors of the Maori people navigated their way to those islands. The Maoris were preliterate people living in tribal chiefdoms without a state. The first brief European contact occurred in 1642 when two Dutch ships under the command of Abel Tasman sailed to Golden Bay at the top of the South Island. After a skirmish with some local Maori attacking in their canoes, Tasman sailed away without landing and never returned. In 1769, James Cook, on the first of his three voyages around the world, became the first European to land on New Zealand and establish contact with the Maoris, who lived as independent tribes, often at war with one another, although they were also bound together by trading networks. Beginning with Cook, the British and Maori established a barter trade. I will return to this evolutionary history of New Zealand in a future post.
In contrast to the recent human settlement of New Zealand, the first human settlers of Australia arrived over 50,000 years ago, probably crossing a land bridge with what is now New Guinea. Until James Cook's mapping of Australia's east coast in 1770 and the first British establishment of a penal settlement in Sydney in 1788, Australia was an isolated continent of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers--with no agriculturalists, pastoralists, or states. When the Europeans arrived, they found a continent of over 300 tribes of hunter-gatherers. This was a perfect laboratory for the study of human evolution as hunter-gatherers, which constituted over 90% of human evolutionary history, and which can be identified as our evolutionary state of nature. To resolve the debate among political philosophers--such as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau--over the state of nature, the study of Aboriginal Australia should be crucial.
Since human beings in the state of nature--like the Aboriginals of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand--have been preliterate people, they have left no written records of their history. Anthropologists from literate societies have tried to write the history of these "prehistoric" people through the ethnographic field research study of hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into recent centuries. But this creates the "contact paradox"--to study hunter-gatherers we must contact them, but this contact changes them from what they were before contact. By the time anthropologists write their ethnographic reports, the hunter-gatherers have been influenced by their contact with agriculturalists and state societies.
The study of Aboriginal Australia minimizes this contact problem, because the purely hunting-gathering way of life of the Aboriginals was isolated from the rest of the world for over 50,000 years, and consequently whatever the Europeans saw in Australia during their first contact can be considered perhaps the best picture of our evolutionary state of nature. Hobbes and Locke thought the European reports about the American Indians might be the best account of the state of nature--"In the beginning, all the world was America," as Locke said. But the European discovery of Australia might be even better--In the beginning, all the world was Australia.
Azar Gat has made that argument in claiming that the evidence for warfare in Aboriginal Australia refutes the assertion of Rousseauian anthropologists that the state of nature was perfectly peaceful and that war was a late cultural invention coming only after the adoption of agriculture and the state. Some of the best evidence for Aboriginal warfare in Australia comes from William Buckley (1780-1856). Buckley was brought to Australia in 1803 as a convict on a convict ship that established a settlement at Port Philip (now Melbourne). He escaped shortly afterwards, and for 32 years he lived with an Aboriginal tribe--the Wallarranga. He learned their language, married one of their women, and joined in all of their activities. In 1835, he returned to the white settler community. For a few years, he worked as an interpreter and mediator for the English in dealing with the Aboriginals. He then moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where he lived for the rest of his life. He told his life story to John Morgan, a Tasmanian newspaper editor, who wrote The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, published in 1852. Although some people have questioned the accuracy of his stories, some anthropologists who have studied the Australian Aboriginals have said that his account of life with the Wallarranga seems quite accurate.
Buckley describes many lethal feuds, raids, and ambushes among the Aboriginal tribes. The most common cause of the conflicts was disputes over women and retaliatory vengeance. He describes their weapons of war--clubs, spears, boomerangs, and shields. Remarkably, there were no bows in Aboriginal Australia. He also relates his observations of cannibalism.
Buckley reports that a typical tribe was composed of 20 to 60 families. Some people--such as skilled hunters and warriors--had high social status, and leading men could have more wives. But "they acknowledge no particular Chief as being superior to the rest" (86), which distinguishes them as pure hunter-gatherers unlike the chiefdoms of the Maori.
Here's one example of Buckley's reporting of warfare. He describes his tribe meeting about 300 members of the hostile Waarengbadawa tribe:
"A general fight now commenced, . . . spears and boomerangs flying in all directions. The sight was very terrific, and their yells and shouts of defiance very horrible. At length one of our tribe had a spear sent right through his body, and he fell. On this, our fellows raised a war cry; on hearing which, the women threw off their rugs, and each armed with a short club, flew to the assistance of their husbands and brothers. . . . Even with this augmentation, our tribe fought to great disadvantage, the enemy being all men, and much more numerous."
". . . I had seen skirmishing and fighting in Holland; and knew something therefore, of what is done when men are knocking one another about with powder and shot, in real earnest, but the scene now before me was much more frightful--both parties looking like so many devils turned loose from Tartarus. Men and women were fighting furiously, and indiscriminately, covered with blook; two of the latter were killed in this affair, which lasted without intermission for two hours; the Waarengbadawas then retreated a short distance, apparently to recover themselves. . . ."
". . . Soon after dark the hostile tribe left the neighborhood; and, on discovering this retreat from the battle ground, ours determined on following them immediately, leaving the women and myself where we were. On approaching the enemy's quarters, they laid themselves down in ambush until all was quiet, and finding most of them asleep, laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot, and wounding several others. The enemy fled precipitately, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs, three loud shouts closing the victors' triumph."
"The bodies of the dead they mutilated in a shocking manner, cutting the arms and legs off, with flints, shells, and tomahawks."
"When the women saw them returning, they also raised great shouts, dancing about in savage ecstasy. The bodies were thrown upon the ground, and beaten about with sticks--in fact, they all seemed to be perfectly mad with excitement; the men cut the flesh off the bones, and stones were heated for baking it; after which, they greased their children with it, all over. The bones were broken to pieces with tomahawks, and given to the dogs, or put on the boughs of trees for the birds of prey hovering over the horrid scene" (60-61).Some people have questioned the reliability of Buckley's reports, but many other historical accounts of Aboriginal warfare written by other European observers in the first few decades after contact confirm Buckley's stories. There is also extensive skeletal evidence of violence among the Aboriginals across Australia studied by archaeologists (Allen 2014; Pardoe 2014). This evidence includes cranial depression fractures and parrying fractures in the bones above the wrist that show the damage from face-to-face combat or from raising the arm in defense against attacks by a club or other weapon.
In response to this evidence for lethal violence among the Aboriginal Australians, some Rousseauian anthropologists like Douglas Fry have argued while this shows that hunter-gatherers engaged in homicide, this is purely personal violence that is not really war. Gat identifies these anthropologists as "Quasi-Rousseauians," because they have given up on Rousseau's claim that hunter-gatherers were perfectly peaceful. But even this modified Rousseauism fails, because much of the violence that Buckley describes includes battles between tribes that clearly qualifies as warfare, because he relates battles involving hundreds of people. Of course, if one defines war in such a narrow way, as Fry does, so that raiding, ambush, and feuding are not defined as war, then forager conflict is not war. But if one defines war as lethal conflict between independent societies, as Steven LeBlanc (2014) does, then the Australian Aborigines certainly engaged in war. As Buckley indicated in the passage above, he had fought as a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and he compared his experience in a European war with the warfare he saw in Australia.
Thus, as Gat concludes, the evidence of Aboriginal Australia seems to show that Hobbes was right about the state of nature being a state of war, and therefore Rousseau was wrong. But the evidence also shows that Hobbes was wrong in claiming that life in the state of nature was a perpetual war with no peaceful cooperation. In fact, Buckley and others have reported that the Aboriginal Australians lived in communities with norms of peaceful cooperation that included intertribal cooperation such as networks of trade. And they sometimes had long periods without intertribal war.
Like many of the social scientists involved in this debate over the evolution of war, Gat assumes that the debate is between two alternatives, represented by Hobbes and Rousseau, and he ignores Locke as taking a third position. Consequently, he fails to see that the evidence supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right. Locke was right to see that the state of nature is a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war: establishing government can therefore have a pacifying effect through the rule of law to settle disputes that easily become violent feuds in the state of nature.
In his new book The Causes of War and The Spread of Peace, Gat comes close to recognizing that the evidence from Aboriginal Australia sustains Locke's account of the state of nature. Gat says that Locke's "more balanced depiction of pre-state as compared to state societies was suggestive" (39). Oddly, however, Gat says that "Locke, like Hobbes and Rousseau, was not a researcher of the past but a political philosopher defending a particular political creed. His interest was the present." Gat does not notice that Locke, like Hobbes and Rousseau, studied the earliest ethnographic reports about hunter-gatherers as evidence for the state of nature.
Some of my earlier posts on Gat can be found here and here.
The same ethnographic and archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer warfare in Aboriginal Australia has been found around the world--including Europe, North America, South America, and New Guinea (Allen and Jones 2014). This supports the conclusion that hunter-gatherers both simple and complex have engaged in socially sanctioned lethal conflict between independent societies, and that this long evolutionary history of warfare can be traced back to early hominins. This shows that human beings have an innate propensity to warfare shared with chimpanzees (Wrangham and Peterson 1996; Wrangham and Glowacki 2012), although human beings can also choose not to act on that innate propensity, particularly when their lives have been shaped by a Lockean liberal culture that favors declining violence.
Posts on the "chimpanzee model" for the evolution of war can be found here, here, and here.
REFERENCES
Allen, Mark W., and Terry L. Jones, eds. 2014. Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers. London: Routledge.
Allen, Mark W. 2014. "Hunter-Gatherer Violence and Warfare in Australia." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 97-111.
Gat, Azar. 2017. The Causes of War and The Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LeBlanc, Steven. 2014. "Forager Warfare and Our Evolutionary Past." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 26-46.
Morgan, John. 2002 (orig. 1852). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley. Ed. Tim Flannery. Melbourne, Australia: The Text Publishing Company.
Pardoe, Colin. 2014. "Conflict and Territoriality in Aboriginal Australia: Evidence from Biology and Ethnography." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 112-132.
Wrangham, Richard, and Dale Peterson. 1996. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Wrangham, Richard, and Luke Glowacki. 2012. "Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model." Human Nature 23:5-29.
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
The Evolutionary Science of Locke's State of Nature: A Response to Seabright, Stieglitz, and Van der Straeten
I have written a long series of posts on the evolutionary science of John Locke's state of nature (here, here, here, here, here, and here). I have argued that the idea of the state of nature in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is an example of an empirical claim by political philosophers about human nature and human history that can be evaluated by the Darwinian science of how human beings originally evolved as hunter-gatherers, which we can identify as the evolutionary state of nature. I have said that if we apply that evolutionary science of hunter-gatherer life to the philosophic debate over the state of nature, we can see that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.
I was pleased, therefore, to see a recent article by Paul Seabright, Jonathan Stieglitz, and Karine Van der Straeten--"Evaluating Social Contract Theory in the Light of Evolutionary Social Science," Evolutionary Human Sciences 3 (2021): e20--which uses the evolutionary science of small-scale societies to evaluate what Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau say about the state of nature. They see these philosophers as distinguishing between human beings living in a state of nature and human beings living in societies with formal institutions, and they see "formal institutions" as institutional norms (usually written) that are enforced by legal and political authorities. They accept this distinction because they see the state of nature as the condition of human life in foraging bands before the invention of agriculture, which was followed by large-scale societies with formal legal and governmental institutions. But they conclude that these three social contract philosophers were wrong about the state of nature as studied by evolutionary scientists, because these philosophers "overlooked the central role of informal social institutions in governing human behavior" (1).
While this criticism is partly true for Hobbes, and mostly true for Rousseau, it is not true at all for Locke. This should be clear to any careful reader of their article who notices that their specific criticisms are directly more at Hobbes and Rousseau than at Locke. And any careful reader of Locke will know that he recognized the importance of "informal social institutions" in the state of nature, which has been confirmed by modern scientific studies of the human hunting-gathering way of life.
Seabright and his colleagues rightly criticize Hobbes and Rousseau for describing life in the state of nature as "solitary," because in fact hunter-gatherers always have a complex social life. But they also note that Locke never uses the word "solitary," and "his description of the state of nature does not seem to indicate solitude at all" (17).
They explain:
"Across small-scale societies there is a modal pattern of social organization characterized by a three-generational system of resource flows (including co-resident offspring, parents and grandparents), a sexual and age-graded division of labor within long-term adult pair bonds . . . . and high levels of cooperation between kin and non-kin . . . . Human hunter-gatherers were probably highly inter-dependent long before the invention of agriculture, contrary to Rousseau's claim that agriculture and its associated divisions of labor paved the way for high inter-dependencies."
"Despite the popular idea that hunter-gatherers are organized in a system of small groups of co-residing kin, their social structure is actually quite fluid and comprises networks of interaction between spatially and genetically distant individuals that extend far beyond a local residential group" (11-12).
Seabright and his colleagues don't recognize that Locke sees all of this. He speaks of the human family in the state of nature as the "first society" (Second Treatise, sec. 77), first the conjugal bonding of husband and wife based on a "voluntary compact," and then the parental care of their children. He sees a division of labor based on sex and age.
Locke also sees social networks of cooperation and exchange extending beyond the family. In Locke's state of nature, there are networks of exchange and trade based on "promises and compacts" (ST, sec. 14). This extended order of cooperation is governed by social norms that Locke identifies as the "law of nature."
Seabright and his colleagues see that social norms are enforced among hunter-gatherers through violent punishment (including capital punishment), reputational costs for those who violate the norms, and third party mediation of disputes. But they don't recognize that Locke also sees this in his state of nature, where everyone has the "executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who transgress the law of nature, where there is a "law of reputation" to enforce the law of nature through praise and blame, and where disputes are often settled by those known to be good mediators (ST secs. 6-14, 108; Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.28.5-14).
Locke's understanding of the state of nature comes largely from his study of the European reports about the American Indians, because he assumed that "in the beginning all the World was America" (ST 49), and that the American Indians provide a "Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST 108). And while it is true that Locke did not have the extensive ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers that we have today, the books in his library about the American Indians did give him a good grasp of hunting-gathering societies.
So, for example, he saw in those reports that foraging bands were sometimes at war with one another, and so he did not make Rousseau's mistake of assuming that the state of nature was utterly peaceful (ST secs. 107-108; A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie, Liberty Fund, p. 76). Hobbes was partly right about the state of nature insofar as he saw this propensity to war. He was partly wrong, however, in that he did not see, as Locke did, that most of the time hunter-gatherers can live by social norms of peaceful cooperation.
Although Locke's state of nature is a roughly egalitarian condition, in the sense that everyone is equally free from the arbitrary absolute power of anyone else, some people have higher status or prestige than others. Seabright and his colleagues write:
"Status hierarchies do indeed exist across diverse small-scale societies, but rather than resulting simply from variation in material wealth, they are often linked to relational wealth (i.e. social ties in marriage, food-sharing, and other cooperative networks) and embodied wealth (i.e. physical and cognitive abilities, such as strength and knowledge/skill, underlying variation in food production and reproductive success)" (13).
They do not recognize, however, that Locke sees all of these status hierarchies in his state of nature (ST secs. 54, 74, 94, 105). While Locke saw the American Indians in the state of nature as showing relative equality compared with other societies, he also saw that all human societies will have some inequality due to individual differences in age, birth, talents, social networks, and luck, which will make some individuals more highly ranked than others. So, for example, among hunter-gatherers, some individuals would inevitably distinguish themselves as skillful hunters or as leaders of their groups. Borgerhoff Mulder and her colleagues (2009) confirmed this, and concluded that those Marxist anthropologists who wanted to find "primitive communism" in foraging societies were mistaken, because hunter-gatherers have a Gini coefficient of around 0.25. I have written about this in a previous post.
Nevertheless, the reputation of hunter-gatherers for being egalitarian is warranted when they are compared with herding and farming societies that have much higher Gini numbers. And yet, among modern nation-states, those that have Lockean liberal social orders have lower inequality. The United States has a slightly lower Gini number than the small-scale herding and farming societies. And the Nordic capitalist welfare states--such as Denmark, Norway, and Finland--have Gini numbers about the same as the foraging societies. (I have written about the Nordic social democracies as liberal regimes here.) This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.
In all of these ways, the evolutionary science of the hunter-gatherer way of life as the original social life for our human ancestors confirms Locke's account of the state of nature; and thus it confirms the Lockean liberalism based on this view of the state of nature.
In Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, perhaps the first full defense of modern liberal democracy, he declared that the democratic state is "the most natural state," because it approaches most nearly the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.
Darwinian evolutionary psychology can confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors manifested the individual liberty and equality that liberal theorists have attributed to the state of nature. And therefore the liberal conception of government as instituted among men to secure the individual rights that first arose in the state of nature might indeed be "the most natural state."
Foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over them. So the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states (with extractive or limited access institutions) can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.
This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, Christopher Boehm, and Christian Welzel.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Locke's Evolutionary History of Politics
Reading Jose de Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies is essential for understanding John Locke's political thought and how evolutionary anthropology might support Lockean liberalism. I have only recently come to that conclusion as I have been revising my Locke chapter for the fourth edition of Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.
Acosta (1540-1600) was a Jesuit priest who worked in Peru from 1572 to 1586, spending his last year in Mexico. His Natural and Moral History of the Indies was published in Spanish in 1590. Following the structure of Pliny's Natural History, Acosta's book was a comprehensive survey of the physical, biological, and anthropological history of the New World. It was one of many travelogue descriptions of the New World that were avidly read in Europe. (Another reason for my interest in this book is that my wife and I will be touring South America this coming summer, including a few weeks in the Galapagos Islands in connection with the Mont Pelerin Society's meeting there on the topic of "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty.")
This was part of a critical turning point in world history, because for the first time in history, the entire Earth was in a global network of human exchange. The traditional histories of human life in Europe--as formulated in ancient philosophy and Biblical religion--were challenged by the discovery of an unknown world of human experience. Much of modern political philosophy was a response to this development--particularly, in the speculation about the original state of nature of humanity, which one can see in the work of Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Smith. Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle continued this tradition of global natural history as inquiry into the universal history of humanity on Earth.
As indicated by Peter Laslett's list of the books in Locke's library when he was writing his Two Treatises of Government, Locke had at least eight books on the history of the New World (or the West Indies), including an English translation of Acosta's book. In his critical edition of the Two Treatises, Laslett has indicated the influence of these books on Locke's writing. The best work that I know showing how these books shaped Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of politics is William Batz's article on "The Historical Anthropology of John Locke."
Acosta's book seems especially important for Locke, because it's the one that Locke directly quotes in the Second Treatise (sec. 102). This comes in Chapter 8 on "The Beginning of Political Societies," in which Locke argues that human beings are originally by nature free, equal, and independent, so that they enter civil society only by their consent.
He acknowledges that one objection to this argument is that there is no historical evidence for this claim that human beings were once free and equal, and that they established government by consent. Locke responds by arguing that there are two kinds of historical evidence for this--the history of America and the history of ancient society in the Bible.
Locke's appeal to history here is fundamental not only for his Two Treatises but also for most of his other writings. Contrary to what many of Locke's scholarly commentators assume, his reasoning depends not on the logical analysis of abstract ideas but on what he identifies in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Intro., 2) as "this historical, plain method." This method of historical reasoning from observational experience shows the influence of Locke's medical practice and experimental research, in which he followed the lead of his friend Thomas Sydenham, who insisted that medical science be guided by the experimental history of health and disease in particular patients rather than theoretical reasoning about abstract ideas. Remarkably, with the exception of a few scholars like Laslett and Batz, most commentators ignore this in their reading of Locke.
So, for example, many scholars debate the meaning of Locke's account of the state of nature as if Locke were engaged in a purely abstract argument without reference to the observable experience of history. This ignores Locke's clear declaration that "in the beginning all the world was America" (ST, 49), and that "the Kings of the Indians in America" is "still a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 108). Thus, Locke follows a methodological assumption that has been fundamental for evolutionary anthropology--that the study of hunter-gatherers who have survived into recent history can illuminate our understanding of what the first prehistoric human beings must have looked like.
That's why Locke turns to Acosta's book and quotes the following as a description of the original state of nature: "And if Josephus Acosta's word may be taken, he tells us, that in many parts of America there was no Government at all. There are great and apparent Conjectures, says he, that these Men, speaking of those of Peru, for a long time had neither Kings nor Commonwealths, but lived in Troops, as they do this day in Florida, the Cheriquanas, those of Bresil, and many other Nations, which have no certain Kings, but as occasion is offered in Peace or War, they choose their Captains as they please" (ST, 102, quoting Acosta, book 1, chap. 25, pp. 73-74).
Here's a new translation of this passage from Acosta by Frances Lopez-Morillas: "There are clear indications for a long time these men had no kings or any form of government but lived in free groups like the Indians of Florida nowadays and the Chiriguanas and Brazilians and many other tribes, who do not have regular kings but in accordance with the occasions that arise in war or peace choose their chiefs as they like."
Notice the ambiguity in this passage. On the one hand, there is said to be among these people "no kings or any form of government" or "no government at all," as Locke says. And yet, on the other hand, it is said that occasionally in war or peace, these people can choose chiefs or captains to lead them.
This is an ambiguity in Locke's account of the state of nature. At times, the state of nature seems to be an utterly asocial and apolitical state in which people live as solitary individuals with no structure of rule at all, which can be interpreted to mean that Locke is denying that human beings are political animals by nature. But, at other times, the state of nature does seem to have some structure of rule, because the family is said to be the "first society," and parental power over children is thus the first structure of authority, although this familial society falls short of "political society" (ST, 77).
This ambiguity is seen in Locke's definition of the state of nature as "men living together according to reason, without a common Superior on Earth, with Authority to judge between them" (ST, 19). Living without any common superior or judge with authority might suggest an asocial state of solitary individuals, but "men living together according to reason" clearly indicates some kind of rule-governed social order.
A similar ambiguity is that while Locke says that the state of nature is a state of peace rather than a state of war, and thus disagrees with Hobbes, Locke also says that the state of nature easily becomes a state of war that induces people to establish government to enforce peace, which agrees with Hobbes (ST, 19, 123). Here is where the Straussians see Locke's Hobbesianism as his secret teaching.
But this assumption that this shows some complicated rhetorical strategy of secret writing becomes less plausible if one looks at the anthropological reports about America that Locke was studying. For example, one report from the French missionary Gabriel Sagard-Theodat describes the Great Lakes Indians in Canada as organized by familial and tribal attachments under the leadership of their chiefs, which shows, he concluded, that "man is a social animal who cannot live without company." And yet the reports of violence and warfare among the American Indians show that living without formal government made it hard for them to live always in peace with one another.
What look like contradictions in Locke's arguments actually show Locke's effort to accurately generalize conclusions about the complex variability of this historical experience, in which primitive people can live orderly social lives governed by informal customary rules, even though the absence of formal governmental institutions makes it hard to settle all disputes peacefully.
Acosta distinguishes three levels or stages in the history of government in Peru and Mexico. The first human beings to arrive in America were savage hunters who crossed over a land bridge from Asia to America. (Acosta was the first person to propose this theory of the original human migration from Asia to America over a land bridge, a theory that is now widely accepted by evolutionary anthropologists.) These hunters had no government. "They had no chief, nor did they recognize one, nor did they worship any gods or have rites or any religion whatsoever" (380-81).
The second stage is "that of free associations or communities, where the people are governed by the advice of many, and are like councils. In time of war, these elect a captain who is obeyed by a whole tribe or province. In time of peace, each town or group of folk rules itself, and each has some prominent men whom the mass of the people respect; and at most some of these join together on matters that seem important to them to see what they ought to do" (359).
The third stage is that of monarchy or empire--like that of the Incas or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico. Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good" (346). But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as beasts and treated themselves as gods (346, 359, 402).
In some passages of his book, however, Acosta combines the first two stages and suggests that even the most primitive hunter-gatherers had some informal leadership by which prominent people could mediate disputes and lead them in war, but always constrained by the informal consent or resistance of the community. The one passage quoted by Locke is an example of this, as though Locke figured out that even primitive foragers would have some episodic and informal structure of rule in which some individuals would have more influence than others, although excessive dominance would be checked by popular resistance.
In the state of nature, Locke observes, "they judged the ablest, and most likely, to Rule over them. Conformable hereunto we find the People of America, who (living out of reach of the Conquering Swords, and spreading domination of the two great Empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoy'd their own natural freedom, though, ceteris paribus, they commonly prefer the Heir of their deceased King; yet if they find him any way weak, or uncapable, they pass him by and set up the stoutest and bravest Man for their Ruler" (ST, 105). The American Indian Kings were originally temporary war leaders. "And though they command absolutely in War, yet at home and in time of Peace they exercise very little Dominion, and have but a very moderate Sovereignty, the Resolutions of Peace and War, being ordinarily either in the People, or in a Council. Though the War itself, which admits not of Plurality of Governours, naturally devolves the Command into the King's sole Authority" (ST, 108).
This appeal to the historical anthropology of the American Indians as showing that government was originally limited in its powers and its ends is part of Locke's argument for liberal toleration in his Letters on Toleration. He argues that there is no justification for European rulers in America to compel the American Indians to convert to Christianity, particularly since they are "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and the Law of Nature, and no ways offending against the Laws of the Society" (40).
In his Second Letter on Toleration, Locke writes: "There are nations in the West-Indies which have no other End of their Society, but their mutual defence against their enemies. In these, their Captain, or Prince, is Sovereign Commander in time of War; but in time of Peace, neither he nor any body else has any Authority over any of the Society. You cannot deny but other, even temporal ends, are attainable by these Commonwealths, if they had been otherwise instituted and appointed to these ends" (77).
In his attack on Locke's Letter on Toleration, Jonas Proast asserted that "Commonwealths are instituted for the attaining of all the Benefits which Political Government can yield; and therefore if the spiritual and eternal Interests of Men may any way be procured or advanced by Political Government, the procuring and advancing those Interests must in all reason be received amongst the Ends of Civil Society, and so consequently fall within the compass of the Magistrate's Jurisdiction" (69).
In response to Proast, Locke insisted that the question was whether government has any power to use force in matters of religion or for the salvation of souls. The argument against this is that governments are not established to use force for such ends. Rather, governments are established by men only to protect themselves against injuries from other men for which there is no protection except governmental force. Religious opinions or forms of worship do not injure those who disagree in any way that requires governmental force against those with those opinions or worship.
To support this conclusion, Locke points again to the American Indians:
Today's evolutionary anthropologists might complain that Locke has confused two levels of primitive social organization--bands and chiefdoms. But still, Locke is remarkably accurate in describing how foraging societies without formal governments--called "stateless societies" today--enforce customary norms of conduct through private arbitration, while also organizing around war leaders in defense against outside groups.
But notice also that the American Indian societies to which Locke is appealing as a standard for political freedom and limited government are societies of hunter-gatherers in a primitive state, and they survived only as long as they remained out of reach of the Incan and Mexican empires. Thus, these hunting-gathering societies were both culturally uncivilized and militarily weak.
The problem for Locke's liberalism is how to combine freedom, civilization, and power.
Beginning 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture after the Last Ice Age, human beings formed sedentary communities with growing populations, which led to the first agrarian states. In these novel circumstances, it became ever harder for subordinates to organize to resist the despotic dominance of their leaders, who now ruled through elaborate military, religious, administrative, and monarchic bureaucracies.
These agrarian states provided the conditions for high civilization — economic wealth, technological innovation, cultural progress (particularly, through the invention of writing), bureaucratic administration, and military power. But that high civilization came with a big price — the loss of the individual freedom from domination that human beings enjoyed in foraging societies. Among foragers, the inequality of power, wealth, and status is minimal. Foraging societies don’t allow some to tyrannize over others. But agrarian states allow ruling elites to live by exploiting those they rule.
Consequently, the history of politics over the past 5,000 years has been largely a conflict between freedom and domination — with the rulers inclined to tyrannical domination and the ruled looking for ways to escape that domination. There has often seemed to be no good resolution to the conflict, because human beings seemed to be caught in a tragic dilemma of having to choose between freedom without civilization and civilization without freedom.
Classical liberalism attempts to overcome this dilemma through liberal republican capitalism. The combination of a liberal society, a republican polity, and a capitalist economy promotes both freedom and civilization: people can be socially, politically, and economically free, while enjoying all the benefits of a progressive civilization. The natural desires for social status, political rule, and economic wealth will always create inequalities of rank that will incline those at the top to become tyrannical. But we can mitigate this through social, political, and economic structures of countervailing power that create competing elites so that power does not become unduly concentrated or unchecked. For classical liberals, such a system is imperfect. But it’s the best we can do.
The Darwinian history of politics provides scientific evidence and argumentation that supports the account of political evolution found in the writings of Locke, Hume, and Smith. The political history of humanity turns on the shifting balance between authority and liberty, between the natural desire of the few for dominance and the natural desire of the many to resist dominance. This shifting balance underlies the three-stage evolution of political history: the egalitarian hierarchy of Paleolithic politics, the despotic hierarchy of agrarian-state politics, and the modern emergence of commercial republican liberalism based on a new kind of egalitarian hierarchy combined with high civilization.
REFERENCES
Acosta, Jose de, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Frances Lopez-Morillas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Batz, William G., "The Historical Anthropology of John Locke," Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974): 663-70.
Burgaleta, Claudio, Jose de Acosta, S.J. (1540-1600): His Life and Thought (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999).
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010).
Some of these points have been developed in some previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Acosta (1540-1600) was a Jesuit priest who worked in Peru from 1572 to 1586, spending his last year in Mexico. His Natural and Moral History of the Indies was published in Spanish in 1590. Following the structure of Pliny's Natural History, Acosta's book was a comprehensive survey of the physical, biological, and anthropological history of the New World. It was one of many travelogue descriptions of the New World that were avidly read in Europe. (Another reason for my interest in this book is that my wife and I will be touring South America this coming summer, including a few weeks in the Galapagos Islands in connection with the Mont Pelerin Society's meeting there on the topic of "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty.")
This was part of a critical turning point in world history, because for the first time in history, the entire Earth was in a global network of human exchange. The traditional histories of human life in Europe--as formulated in ancient philosophy and Biblical religion--were challenged by the discovery of an unknown world of human experience. Much of modern political philosophy was a response to this development--particularly, in the speculation about the original state of nature of humanity, which one can see in the work of Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Smith. Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle continued this tradition of global natural history as inquiry into the universal history of humanity on Earth.
As indicated by Peter Laslett's list of the books in Locke's library when he was writing his Two Treatises of Government, Locke had at least eight books on the history of the New World (or the West Indies), including an English translation of Acosta's book. In his critical edition of the Two Treatises, Laslett has indicated the influence of these books on Locke's writing. The best work that I know showing how these books shaped Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of politics is William Batz's article on "The Historical Anthropology of John Locke."
Acosta's book seems especially important for Locke, because it's the one that Locke directly quotes in the Second Treatise (sec. 102). This comes in Chapter 8 on "The Beginning of Political Societies," in which Locke argues that human beings are originally by nature free, equal, and independent, so that they enter civil society only by their consent.
He acknowledges that one objection to this argument is that there is no historical evidence for this claim that human beings were once free and equal, and that they established government by consent. Locke responds by arguing that there are two kinds of historical evidence for this--the history of America and the history of ancient society in the Bible.
Locke's appeal to history here is fundamental not only for his Two Treatises but also for most of his other writings. Contrary to what many of Locke's scholarly commentators assume, his reasoning depends not on the logical analysis of abstract ideas but on what he identifies in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Intro., 2) as "this historical, plain method." This method of historical reasoning from observational experience shows the influence of Locke's medical practice and experimental research, in which he followed the lead of his friend Thomas Sydenham, who insisted that medical science be guided by the experimental history of health and disease in particular patients rather than theoretical reasoning about abstract ideas. Remarkably, with the exception of a few scholars like Laslett and Batz, most commentators ignore this in their reading of Locke.
So, for example, many scholars debate the meaning of Locke's account of the state of nature as if Locke were engaged in a purely abstract argument without reference to the observable experience of history. This ignores Locke's clear declaration that "in the beginning all the world was America" (ST, 49), and that "the Kings of the Indians in America" is "still a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 108). Thus, Locke follows a methodological assumption that has been fundamental for evolutionary anthropology--that the study of hunter-gatherers who have survived into recent history can illuminate our understanding of what the first prehistoric human beings must have looked like.
That's why Locke turns to Acosta's book and quotes the following as a description of the original state of nature: "And if Josephus Acosta's word may be taken, he tells us, that in many parts of America there was no Government at all. There are great and apparent Conjectures, says he, that these Men, speaking of those of Peru, for a long time had neither Kings nor Commonwealths, but lived in Troops, as they do this day in Florida, the Cheriquanas, those of Bresil, and many other Nations, which have no certain Kings, but as occasion is offered in Peace or War, they choose their Captains as they please" (ST, 102, quoting Acosta, book 1, chap. 25, pp. 73-74).
Here's a new translation of this passage from Acosta by Frances Lopez-Morillas: "There are clear indications for a long time these men had no kings or any form of government but lived in free groups like the Indians of Florida nowadays and the Chiriguanas and Brazilians and many other tribes, who do not have regular kings but in accordance with the occasions that arise in war or peace choose their chiefs as they like."
Notice the ambiguity in this passage. On the one hand, there is said to be among these people "no kings or any form of government" or "no government at all," as Locke says. And yet, on the other hand, it is said that occasionally in war or peace, these people can choose chiefs or captains to lead them.
This is an ambiguity in Locke's account of the state of nature. At times, the state of nature seems to be an utterly asocial and apolitical state in which people live as solitary individuals with no structure of rule at all, which can be interpreted to mean that Locke is denying that human beings are political animals by nature. But, at other times, the state of nature does seem to have some structure of rule, because the family is said to be the "first society," and parental power over children is thus the first structure of authority, although this familial society falls short of "political society" (ST, 77).
This ambiguity is seen in Locke's definition of the state of nature as "men living together according to reason, without a common Superior on Earth, with Authority to judge between them" (ST, 19). Living without any common superior or judge with authority might suggest an asocial state of solitary individuals, but "men living together according to reason" clearly indicates some kind of rule-governed social order.
A similar ambiguity is that while Locke says that the state of nature is a state of peace rather than a state of war, and thus disagrees with Hobbes, Locke also says that the state of nature easily becomes a state of war that induces people to establish government to enforce peace, which agrees with Hobbes (ST, 19, 123). Here is where the Straussians see Locke's Hobbesianism as his secret teaching.
But this assumption that this shows some complicated rhetorical strategy of secret writing becomes less plausible if one looks at the anthropological reports about America that Locke was studying. For example, one report from the French missionary Gabriel Sagard-Theodat describes the Great Lakes Indians in Canada as organized by familial and tribal attachments under the leadership of their chiefs, which shows, he concluded, that "man is a social animal who cannot live without company." And yet the reports of violence and warfare among the American Indians show that living without formal government made it hard for them to live always in peace with one another.
What look like contradictions in Locke's arguments actually show Locke's effort to accurately generalize conclusions about the complex variability of this historical experience, in which primitive people can live orderly social lives governed by informal customary rules, even though the absence of formal governmental institutions makes it hard to settle all disputes peacefully.
Acosta distinguishes three levels or stages in the history of government in Peru and Mexico. The first human beings to arrive in America were savage hunters who crossed over a land bridge from Asia to America. (Acosta was the first person to propose this theory of the original human migration from Asia to America over a land bridge, a theory that is now widely accepted by evolutionary anthropologists.) These hunters had no government. "They had no chief, nor did they recognize one, nor did they worship any gods or have rites or any religion whatsoever" (380-81).
The second stage is "that of free associations or communities, where the people are governed by the advice of many, and are like councils. In time of war, these elect a captain who is obeyed by a whole tribe or province. In time of peace, each town or group of folk rules itself, and each has some prominent men whom the mass of the people respect; and at most some of these join together on matters that seem important to them to see what they ought to do" (359).
The third stage is that of monarchy or empire--like that of the Incas or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico. Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good" (346). But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as beasts and treated themselves as gods (346, 359, 402).
In some passages of his book, however, Acosta combines the first two stages and suggests that even the most primitive hunter-gatherers had some informal leadership by which prominent people could mediate disputes and lead them in war, but always constrained by the informal consent or resistance of the community. The one passage quoted by Locke is an example of this, as though Locke figured out that even primitive foragers would have some episodic and informal structure of rule in which some individuals would have more influence than others, although excessive dominance would be checked by popular resistance.
In the state of nature, Locke observes, "they judged the ablest, and most likely, to Rule over them. Conformable hereunto we find the People of America, who (living out of reach of the Conquering Swords, and spreading domination of the two great Empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoy'd their own natural freedom, though, ceteris paribus, they commonly prefer the Heir of their deceased King; yet if they find him any way weak, or uncapable, they pass him by and set up the stoutest and bravest Man for their Ruler" (ST, 105). The American Indian Kings were originally temporary war leaders. "And though they command absolutely in War, yet at home and in time of Peace they exercise very little Dominion, and have but a very moderate Sovereignty, the Resolutions of Peace and War, being ordinarily either in the People, or in a Council. Though the War itself, which admits not of Plurality of Governours, naturally devolves the Command into the King's sole Authority" (ST, 108).
This appeal to the historical anthropology of the American Indians as showing that government was originally limited in its powers and its ends is part of Locke's argument for liberal toleration in his Letters on Toleration. He argues that there is no justification for European rulers in America to compel the American Indians to convert to Christianity, particularly since they are "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and the Law of Nature, and no ways offending against the Laws of the Society" (40).
In his Second Letter on Toleration, Locke writes: "There are nations in the West-Indies which have no other End of their Society, but their mutual defence against their enemies. In these, their Captain, or Prince, is Sovereign Commander in time of War; but in time of Peace, neither he nor any body else has any Authority over any of the Society. You cannot deny but other, even temporal ends, are attainable by these Commonwealths, if they had been otherwise instituted and appointed to these ends" (77).
In his attack on Locke's Letter on Toleration, Jonas Proast asserted that "Commonwealths are instituted for the attaining of all the Benefits which Political Government can yield; and therefore if the spiritual and eternal Interests of Men may any way be procured or advanced by Political Government, the procuring and advancing those Interests must in all reason be received amongst the Ends of Civil Society, and so consequently fall within the compass of the Magistrate's Jurisdiction" (69).
In response to Proast, Locke insisted that the question was whether government has any power to use force in matters of religion or for the salvation of souls. The argument against this is that governments are not established to use force for such ends. Rather, governments are established by men only to protect themselves against injuries from other men for which there is no protection except governmental force. Religious opinions or forms of worship do not injure those who disagree in any way that requires governmental force against those with those opinions or worship.
To support this conclusion, Locke points again to the American Indians:
"let me ask you, Whether it be not possible that Men, to whom the Rivers and Woods afforded the spontaneous Provisions of Life, and so with no private Possessions of Land, had no inlarged Desires after Riches or Power; should live together in Society, make one People of one Language under one Chieftain, who shall have no other Power but to command them in time of War against their common Enemies, without any municipal Laws, Judges, or any Person with Superiority establish'd amongst them, but ended all their private Differences, if any arose, by the extemporary Determination of their Neighbors, or of Arbitrators chosen by the Parties. I ask you whether in such a Commonwealth, the Chieftain who was the only Man of Authority amongst them, had any Power to use the Force of the Commonwealth to any other End but the Defense of it against an Enemy, though other Benefits were attainable by it." (76)
Today's evolutionary anthropologists might complain that Locke has confused two levels of primitive social organization--bands and chiefdoms. But still, Locke is remarkably accurate in describing how foraging societies without formal governments--called "stateless societies" today--enforce customary norms of conduct through private arbitration, while also organizing around war leaders in defense against outside groups.
But notice also that the American Indian societies to which Locke is appealing as a standard for political freedom and limited government are societies of hunter-gatherers in a primitive state, and they survived only as long as they remained out of reach of the Incan and Mexican empires. Thus, these hunting-gathering societies were both culturally uncivilized and militarily weak.
The problem for Locke's liberalism is how to combine freedom, civilization, and power.
Beginning 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture after the Last Ice Age, human beings formed sedentary communities with growing populations, which led to the first agrarian states. In these novel circumstances, it became ever harder for subordinates to organize to resist the despotic dominance of their leaders, who now ruled through elaborate military, religious, administrative, and monarchic bureaucracies.
These agrarian states provided the conditions for high civilization — economic wealth, technological innovation, cultural progress (particularly, through the invention of writing), bureaucratic administration, and military power. But that high civilization came with a big price — the loss of the individual freedom from domination that human beings enjoyed in foraging societies. Among foragers, the inequality of power, wealth, and status is minimal. Foraging societies don’t allow some to tyrannize over others. But agrarian states allow ruling elites to live by exploiting those they rule.
Consequently, the history of politics over the past 5,000 years has been largely a conflict between freedom and domination — with the rulers inclined to tyrannical domination and the ruled looking for ways to escape that domination. There has often seemed to be no good resolution to the conflict, because human beings seemed to be caught in a tragic dilemma of having to choose between freedom without civilization and civilization without freedom.
Classical liberalism attempts to overcome this dilemma through liberal republican capitalism. The combination of a liberal society, a republican polity, and a capitalist economy promotes both freedom and civilization: people can be socially, politically, and economically free, while enjoying all the benefits of a progressive civilization. The natural desires for social status, political rule, and economic wealth will always create inequalities of rank that will incline those at the top to become tyrannical. But we can mitigate this through social, political, and economic structures of countervailing power that create competing elites so that power does not become unduly concentrated or unchecked. For classical liberals, such a system is imperfect. But it’s the best we can do.
The Darwinian history of politics provides scientific evidence and argumentation that supports the account of political evolution found in the writings of Locke, Hume, and Smith. The political history of humanity turns on the shifting balance between authority and liberty, between the natural desire of the few for dominance and the natural desire of the many to resist dominance. This shifting balance underlies the three-stage evolution of political history: the egalitarian hierarchy of Paleolithic politics, the despotic hierarchy of agrarian-state politics, and the modern emergence of commercial republican liberalism based on a new kind of egalitarian hierarchy combined with high civilization.
REFERENCES
Acosta, Jose de, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Frances Lopez-Morillas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Batz, William G., "The Historical Anthropology of John Locke," Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974): 663-70.
Burgaleta, Claudio, Jose de Acosta, S.J. (1540-1600): His Life and Thought (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999).
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010).
Some of these points have been developed in some previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Friday, January 22, 2016
A Prehistoric Massacre in Africa Suggests that the State of Nature was a State of War
Skeletal Remains of Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers Killed in a Massacre at the Site of Nataruk, West of Lake Turkana, Kenya
One of the fundamental debates in the history of political philosophy is over whether the state of nature was a state of peace or a state of war. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all agree that the first human beings lived as foraging hunter-gatherers, but they disagree about whether this original human condition was generally violent or generally peaceful. Hobbes claimed that without any government to enforce peace, life among these first human beings must have been an utterly lawless war of all against all. Locke inferred from reports about hunter-gatherer bands in America that life in a state of nature could be a state of peace, but it could easily become a state of war. Rousseau thought that the evidence refuted both Hobbes and Locke in suggesting that the first human ancestors were peaceful, and that war did not arise until the invention of agriculture led to a less nomadic and more settled social life.
As I have indicated in my many posts on this issue, this has continued to be one of the most contentious debates in the social sciences, with some social scientists (such as Richard Wrangham) arguing for the Hobbesian position that the evolution of our foraging human ancestors was shaped by warfare, and others (such as Douglas Fry) arguing for the Rousseauan position that nomadic foragers were generally peaceful, and that war was a cultural invention of the agricultural societies that emerged 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Now that we have more archaeological and anthropological evidence than was available to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we are reaching the point where we might settle this debate. I have argued that the evidence suggests that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right. Locke was right in seeing that foraging human bands can enforce customary laws of cooperation that secure a peaceful life, but that in the absence of formal governmental rule, feuding often leads to war.
And yet while the evidence pertinent to this debate has been growing, the evidence is still limited in ways that make it difficult to reach any demonstrative proof. Inferences about warfare among prehistoric foragers from ethnographic reports about foraging societies are open to dispute, because modern hunter-gatherers might be quite different from prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and because we can argue about whether acts of violence against individuals or small groups of individuals should be described as warfare. The archaeological evidence for prehistoric warfare among foragers has been severely limited, because when prehistoric skeletons show signs of homicidal violence, it's hard to know whether this should be interpreted as showing warfare rather than inter-personal violence within a society.
But now in this week's issue of Nature, we have a report of the first prehistoric skeletal evidence for a massacre in a foraging society: Marta Mirazon Lahr, et al., "Inter-Group Violence among Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya," Nature 529 (21 January 2016): 394-398. The New York Times has an article about this.
A team of scientists reports the discovery of the first clear evidence of the intentional killing of a small band of foragers in prehistory. In 2012, they found the skeletal remains of 27 individuals at the site of Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The skeletal remains are dated at around 10,000 years ago. 12 of the individuals were preserved as articulated skeletons. 10 of these 12 show evidence of major traumatic lesions that would have been lethal. There are fractures from violence in heads, necks, hands, and ribs. For example, the skull pictured above shows multiple traumatic lesions to the cranium, involving blunt force to the frontal and left temporal bones. In one case, a projectile was found embedded in a cranium. In another case, projectiles were found within a body cavity. There is no evidence of burial for any of these skeletal remains.
The Hobbesians like Richard Wrangham will see this as one of the best archaeological discoveries for confirming that warfare was part of human evolution in prehistoric foraging societies before the invention of agriculture.
But the Rousseauans like Douglas Fry will say that skeletal evidence like this from one site is not enough to be conclusive. As quoted in the New York Times article, Fry has also said that these foragers might have been moving away from a purely nomadic life to a more settled life, and thus this would not be evidence for warfare among nomadic foragers.
I see evidence that the co-authors of the article in Nature disagree with one another over whether their discovery supports the Hobbesian view or the Rousseauan view. Here's the last paragraph of their article:
"As one of the clearest cases of inter-group violence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the event recorded at Nataruk offers information on the socio-economic conditions that marked the presence of warfare. However, there are two interpretations of how this fact impinges on our understanding of war among foraging societies. West Turkana 10,000 years ago was a fertile lakeshore landscape sustaining a substantial population of hunter-gatherers; the presence of pottery may be indicative of some storage and so reduced mobility. Thus, the massacre at Nataruk could be seen as resulting from a raid for resources--territory, women, children, food stored in pots--whose value was similar to those of later food-producing societies among whom violent attacks on settlements and organized defence strategies became part of life. In this light, the importance of what happened at Nataruk would be in terms of extending the chronology and degree of the same underlying socio-economic conditions that characterize early warfare in more recent periods. Alternatively, Nataruk may offer evidence not of changing conditions towards a settled, materially richer, and demographically denser way of life, but of a standard antagonistic response to an encounter between two social groups. As such, Nataruk would be important for the particular circumstances that preserved an ephemeral, but perhaps not unusual, event in the life of prehistoric foraging societies. In either case, the deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war" (397).The first of these two conflicting interpretations supports a modified version of the Rousseauan view. The second interpretation supports the Hobbesian view. The news reports about this article (here, here, and here) suggest to me that Marta Mirazon Lahr, the lead author of the article, is taking the Hobbesian view, while Robert Foley, a co-author, is taking a modified Rousseauan view.
In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau claimed that warfare began with the invention of agriculture, which he called the "great revolution," because it brought the territorial settlements, the accumulation of property and the status hierarchies that provided the conditions for war. But Rousseau also recognized that before agricultural societies, the "first revolution" in human history was the establishment of family life in settled societies that produced some forms of property.
Some anthropologists today might see this as the pre-agricultural revolution in which nomadic foragers moved towards becoming complex foragers living a somewhat settled existence. If there were some abundant source of food, such as fish along a shoreline or in a river, foragers could camp there, either seasonally or year-round. They could then store some of their food. And their population could grow. But once they took control of this territory and its abundant resources, they became targets for other foraging bands who might want to take their property, and thus began warfare. There are many examples of this in the ethnographic and archaeological record. The most famous example of this is the complex foraging societies that formed on the Northwest Coast of North America. Once formerly nomadic foragers became dependent on the intense harvesting of aquatic resources, they settled into permanent villages, in which there was increasing population and inequality in property and status, and which produced competition over valuable resources (stored food, territory, and women) that led to warfare. These complex foraging settlements have appeared thousands of years before agricultural settlements. By contrast, fully nomadic foragers show inter-personal violence within their bands, but not inter-group warfare.
As quoted in the Washington Post, Robert Foley seems to adopt this interpretation of the foragers who were killed at Nataruk:
"According to Foley, the skeletons appear to have belonged to a group of hunter-gatherers living at the time on the lush, marshy edge of a lagoon where they used bone harpoons to fish and hunt. They were probably more sedentary than most foraging communities, as there are indications that the environment was quite rich.
"Although any guesses as to why they were killed are speculations, Foley said it is possible that another group found the area attractive and competed for it."Similar quotations from Foley appear in the story at LiveScience:
"The number of casualties rules out the notion of an interfamily feud, Foley said. More people from the group may have been killed, and still others may have escaped, which suggests the group was larger than the average hunter-gatherer group. (Most hunter-gatherer groups tend to hover around 25 to 30 people per encampment, Foley said.) And given the simple tools used to deal death, the attacking group was probably larger still, he added.
"This idea suggests that the two warring groups were likely more settled than the average hunter-gatherer population, Foley said. That's not surprising, as hunter-gatherers who tend to stay in one place for longer periods often live near lakes, where food is plentiful and unlikely to be depleted by long stays, he added.
"'That fits into the idea of a slightly more densely packed population where intergroup conflict is likely to arise,' Foley said. 'It's quite difficult to have a war with a highly mobile group that's very dispersed.'"Douglas Fry agrees with Foley in seeing this prehistoric warfare in Nataruk as showing the intergroup violence that arises among complex foragers, but not among fully nomadic foragers. Thus, Fry can argue that this discovery support his Rousseauan view that throughout most of human evolutionary history, when human beings lived as nomadic foragers, there was no warfare; and consequently war must be seen as a cultural invention of recent history.
Lahr, however, seems to disagree with Foley and Fry. As quoted by Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times, Lahr says that while there is lots of evidence of warfare "among settled, sedentary communities," the discovery in Nataruk is the first "archaeological record of armed conflict between early nomadic hunter-gatherer groups." She suggests that the foragers who were massacred had not established a settlement on the lake, but rather they were a "small traveling band of hunter-gatherers who stopped by a lagoon to hunt or fish." And so, she seems to be adopting the Hobbesian interpretation of this archaeological discovery as confirming that warfare was prevalent among our earliest foraging ancestors, and thus deeply rooted in our evolved human nature.
Some of my posts on this debate over the evolution of war can be found here, here, here, here, and here, which include links to many other posts on this.
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