2024.03.28

This is going to be a long rambly one because I've got a lot kicking around in my head that I'm struggling to get out in an organized fashion. I’m still thinking about Hobbes.

Natural equality creates war, but also peace

I think that his articulation of natural equality is the organizing principle for what I would call “the art and science of war and peace,” because the more I think about it the more I've come to the conclusion that Hobbes kind of gets a bad rap for dwelling on a very pessimistic view of the human condition, it being a war of all against all. But if you think about it, peace can't be possible without the same natural equality, because the reason everyone's in this war of all against all is that adjudicating power is always contestable. So, because everyone has a natural equality of their faculties of mind and body, no one's strong enough to overpower everybody else, no one's smart enough to outsmart everybody else; and even if you are the strongest and the smartest, everyone else can form a what he calls a “confederacy” against you. They can ally themselves against you in a group large enough that you can't assert total power. So, because that total power is always contested everyone's in a state of war, a perpetual war of all against all.

However, peace also is possible only in that state, because if there was anyone powerful enough to you their dominion over all other people, there could be no peace. Eventually, what would happen is that person would just be in charge, and they would be an unstoppable tyrant. So, it's only because of the natural equality of the human condition that war and peace are both possible.

The state of nature thought experiment

I'll just end that thought there and immediately non sequitur segue to a different thought, which is how Hobbes arrived at this principle of natural equality. He does that through a thought experiment that philosophers call the state of nature which I think is hard to contextualize when people first encounter it because it sounds like there that it's a chronological state of nature Basically, all philosophers mean when they say state of nature is a pre-political society, or society before there is social organization, before there is power structures, before there are governments, before there are police forces and elections and things that organize a group of people into a civilized society.

But it doesn't necessarily mean chronologically before. It doesn't mean it actually happened at any point in history. It means conceptually prior. So, the state of nature, the best way I can explain it is through a personal anecdote which I have told before but I'll tell again in a revised format.

I used to own a house. I lived out in the country, it was a fairly rural area, a small town. And I had a neighbor who I was on very good terms with and he wanted to build a fence between our two yards. Now, I thought this was a great idea. I also wanted put a fence there. We were both dog owners, so we wanted to enclose our backyards so our dogs could run around, and we both knew that it would be good for our property values when we went to resell our homes if we put in a fence, and just overall it was a great idea. So, I wasn't opposed to the idea, but when he came to talk to me about it we had to decide where exactly the fence was going to go between our two houses, and as we were discussing it, it became obvious that we didn't actually know where the legal property line was between our two properties. So, we had to go to the municipality and say “Hey, do you have a document that says exactly where the line is,” and they said, “No,” because a survey hadn't been done since who knows when. So, we had to hire a land surveyor to come out and take measurements and go to the municipal building and review records of sale and purchase and do all kinds of research, and then he had to come back and basically put a chalk line down and say, “This is the line between your two properties.”

So, the way I would describe this state of nature is to say the following: imagine that “dispute” by neighbour and me in the absence of adjudicating power. I put “dispute” in quotation marks because my neighbor and I weren't arguing over it, we weren't disputing it in the usual sense of that term. We weren't saying, “No, this is mine and that's not yours.” But it was a potential dispute. And the only reason we were able to resolve that potential dispute is because there were all these authority structures in place that could adjudicate the dispute. There were representatives of the municipal government to say, “Hey, in the past you signed you your deed that says the property has these measurements, your neighbor's property has these measurements; here's the official points on the ground where those measurements begin and end.” And we could appeal to the adjudication of the municipal authority, and then that authority was embodied in the land surveyor who came out and did all the due diligence to tell us where the fence would go. Then we built a fence.

I say all of that to make the point that, to Hobbes, if you want to understand what the state of nature is, imagine that dispute in a world where that adjudicating power doesn't exist. For Hobbes, the ultimate principle of organization for a political society is an adjudicating power that all sides to a dispute have to respect. And for Hobbes they will respect it or they have to be compelled to abide by the adjudication of the of the sovereign. That's the easiest way to think of the state of nature thought experiment. What would happen if that authority wasn't there.

And he comes to all of these conclusions about which I've talked about ad nauseum the last couple of weeks. The natural equality leads to this state of competition because the only way you can competitively resolve these disputes is through your own power, through your own principle of self-preservation, your own mental and physical capacities. And because of that, civilization is essentially impossible, because cooperation is impossible, because anytime a cooperative or productive form of human engagement becomes contested anytime, if there's a disagreement over who gets what or who owns what, or who lives where, or even the threat that someone poses to you whether they pose a threat to you or not, if you perceive it as such – those potential conflicts can't be resolved other than through your own power. So, everybody lives in this perpetual state of fear, suspicion, mutual distrust.

Therefore, the state of nature is one of Perpetual danger and that perpetual danger makes civilization impossible, which is what Hobbes spells out in his famous paragraph that says, “there can be no navigation, there can be no recording of history, there can be no building of things other than what you can build yourself, etc.” because of the inability to form cooperative frameworks with others that have forcing functions that compel everyone to abide by the framework even when they disagree with it.

Now, I'll pause that thought there.

The social contract as the way out of the state of nature

That was the state of nature, and I haven't really got to the third thing yet because I've been really in the weeds on the first two topics. But Hobbes’ way out of this state of nature is the social contract, which is also another philosophical concept that I think he was the first one to articulate. The social contract is for Hobbes how citizens invest their power in a sovereign. They sacrifice some of their personal power that they have inside the state of nature. In the state of nature you have the right to do whatever you can to preserve yourself. You have to sacrifice some of that so that a sovereign will protect you and your rights and adjudicate conflicts on your behalf, but that means you give up the ability to kill those you disagree with.

So, if my neighbor and I went to the municipal office and they said, “Actually, Mr. Smith, the property line is ten feet closer to your house than you thought. Your property is considerably smaller than you were thinking,” well I have to respect that. Whereas in the state of nature I don't, I can just kill my neighbor take his land. And there's no one that can tell me that was the wrong thing to do, because in that circumstance, to Hobbes, there is no right or wrong before the establishment of the sovereign. The only natural right you need to worry about is your right to

preserve yourself and do whatever you think is required to perpetuate your own well-being, to conserve your own wellbeing.

The social contract to Hobbes means something very specific, and it will definitely change over the next couple hundred years as different theorists approach it, there'll be more emphasis on private property under Locke than Hobbes put on it.

The organizing principle

But I think those three big concepts – natural equality as the basis of war and peace, the state of nature, and the social contract – are the three big claim clusters that I need to articulate to say, “Here's my organizing principle for understanding war and peace,” or what I would call “The Art and Science of War and Peace.”