This post is the script for a video essay on the state of nature uploaded to the Social Contract Research Network YouTube channel. The material was written to be viewed.
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This is a video about a powerful idea. It is an idea that shapes our view of ourselves, and of what it means to live a good life. It is an idea that is fundamental to, the legacy of colonisation and slavery, to our understanding of how the economy works, and our view of the natural world.
This idea is called the state of nature. It is an idea that none of us can avoid being influenced by today, but that few people understand.
At its best, the state of nature is a mirror we hold up to ourselves, in which we can see our values, our dreams and our nightmares and in which we can come to understand ourselves, perhaps for the first time. At its worst, it is a drug that has lulled the West into some of its most brutal acts.
This is the first in a series of videos about the state of nature. Future videos are going to take a historical deep dive into the state of nature idea in key thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But first we need to understand why the state of nature idea matters to us today.
At its most basic, the “state of nature” describes the supposed condition of human life outside society or outside the state, before people come together in a social contract. But it doesn’t just refer to the dim and distant past. There are three additional meanings of state of nature language: It is used to describe the way of life of hunter gatherer or loosely organised communities today; it continues to be used in international relations and international jurisprudence to describe the relationships between nations; and it describes the possible future into which we would descend if society broke down, perhaps through a civil war or a nuclear explosion.
There are eight ways in which the state of nature idea matters to us and influences us today.
WHO ARE WE?
First, it The state of nature idea shows us who we think we are… by showing us who we think we are not. The way it paints humans outside society shows us what we think society is.
Drawing on the work of Thomas Hobbes, some accounts of the state of nature paint life outside society as violent, hard and miserable. Hobbes called it a state of war, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
On this view, human beings are fundamentally selfish, fearful and competitive, and they need ruling with an iron fist if they are not to destroy each other. We see this in books and films like Lord of the Flies and the Mad Max franchise.
And on this view, society and the state are our great achievements: emancipating us from our own worst instincts. It is society allows us to flourish.
Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, other accounts of the state of nature paint it as a paradise of people living in harmony with each other and with the environment, taking from the natural world just enough resources to live comfortably, and free from the corruption, covetousness and competitiveness of society.
For this view, human beings are fundamentally good and cooperative, and they just need setting free from the corrupting influence of modern society in order to flourish. We see this in films like Avatar, in the 1970s flower power movement, and in drives to make life more “simple” or more “natural”.
On this view, society, private property and the state are destructive influences, enslaving people against their own best impulses. As Rousseau famously writes at the beginning of The Social Contract: “Man is born free, but and everywhere he is in chains”. It is returning to nature that allows us to flourish.
For both these conditions, it is as if taking humans outside society reveals some true and hidden essence. The state of nature is the truth of the human condition.
WHAT IS GOOD?
As well as telling us who we are, the state of nature shapes our sense of what is good, valuable, and desirable.
For the Hobbesian, negative state of nature, the moral good is found in society. Human rights and equality are grounded in social conventions, not in nature. The natural state is a dark age, and we must at all costs a return to which is to be avoided events that would return us to it, like civil war.
This negative view gives rise to figures like the uncivilized savage or the barbarian, paraded at so-called “human zoos” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aspects of it are captured in Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature, in which he argues that society is getting better and better, less and less violent. It is driving the attitude that technology and progress are good, and can solve our problems.
For the Rousseauian, positive state of nature, the moral good is found by looking at humans in their natural condition. Human rights and equality are grounded in natural rights, not in social conventions. The natural state is a golden age and we must at all costs retrieve and preserve its the benefits of which are to be preserved at all costs.
This positive view gives rise to figures in the social imaginary like the “noble savage”, and the indigenous person as the holder of unique and priceless wisdom.
It is captured in and Margaret Mead’s influential 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, which painted a picture of peaceful, fulfilled, free love. It is captured in James Scott’s book Against the Grain, in which he points out a number of benefits in the hunter gatherer lifestyle that we have now lost.
This version of the state of nature drives the attitude that what is good is what is natural, pure and untouched by social artificiality, and it helps us understand the pull of trends like the paleo diet and barefoot running.
The tension between natural morality and conventional/social morality is captured in the title of one of the founding documents of the human rights tradition: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Sympathetic to a Rousseauian position, the “rights of man” grounds rights in the state of nature, whereas closer to a Hobbesian position, “the rights of the citizen” grounds rights in society.
HOW SHOULD WE TREAT OTHER CULTURES?
The state of nature also influences how we treat other cultures, and our attitude to colonialism and slavery.
In the seventeenth century, state of nature arguments were used by John Locke and others to justify colonialism and the appropriation by European settlers of land in the Americas, Africa and Australia. And to justify slavery.
Today the positive and negative views of the state of nature lead to a polarised attitude to other cultures.
On the one hand there is the desire avoid cultural imperialism and respect all cultures, regardless of their practices and beliefs. Some of these beliefs and customs such as the treatment of women or the hunting of endangered species sometimes offend Western sensibilities, but the positive state of nature doctrine contributes to an outlook according to which it becomes imperialistic to condemn them.
On the other hand, the desire to cultivate and educate non-Western cultures that drove Locke’s attitude to native peoples can still be seen today. For example, it is common for the West to tie the granting of foreign aid to human rights pledges.
Today, it is not the land of other nations that the West considers uncultivated and open for its own exploitation, but their ideas and values.
HOW SHOULD WE TREAT OTHER STATES?
The state of nature is also is a framework through which we still understand the relationships between states today.
The positive state of nature sees these relationships between states as fundamentally cooperative, until we find evidence to the contrary.
The positive negative state of nature sees relationships between states as fundamentally hostile, and the suspicion remains even if there is evidence to the contrary.
HOW SHOULD WE TREAT THE NATURAL WORLD?
The state of nature idea plays a major role in conditioning our assumptions about the natural world.
For o the positive state of nature, the natural world is something we need to conserve and respect. The solution to environmental problems is found in reducing our footprint: eating less meat is the solution to food shortages; consuming fewer fossil fuels and rewilding are the solution to global warming.
For the negative state of nature, the natural world is something we need to exploit, cultivate and make productive. This is powerfully articulated in Francis Bacon’s idea that nature is like an unruly woman that must be tamed by man’s violence if necessary, who yields her secrets only when she is “under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.”[1] The solution to environmental problems is to be found in technology: genetic engineering is the solution to food shortages, and geoengineering is the solution to climate change.
CAN WE CHANGE SOCEITY?
Your view of the state of nature will influence how you approach the possibility of social change.
If you think that the state of nature sets a norm for human life, you will appeal to the “natural” human condition or to natural rights in order to reject unnatural or alienating social policies: “this is not how we were meant to live; these conditions are unnatural”.
If you do not think that the state of nature sets a norm for human life, you will appeal to conventional and agreed norms to justify the need for social change: “this is not how we should live in the twenty-first century; these conditions are uncivilized”.
HOW SHOULD WE RUN THE ECONOMY?
Different ideas about the state of nature are at the root different economic ideologies.
In short: is the economy natural, or artificial? Should the economy be treated like a self-balancing natural ecosystem, or like an artifact of the social contract that we need to define construct and maintain ourselves?
If we treat the economy like a natural, self-regulating organism we will not intervene in booms or busts, or to lessen inequalities of wealth. This is the free-market position characterised by Adam Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand”:
Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… he intends only his own gain, By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.[2]
If we treat the economy like part of the social contract that we construct ourselves, we will intervene with regulations and social benefits to prevent boom and bust, and we will reduce inequality with measures to redistribute wealth. This is John Maynard Kenyes’s idea when he argues that government intervention is necessary to stabilize the economy and prices, and increase employment.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
Finally, the state of nature is important because it functions for us as like a myth, making sense of our lives. In the same way that the opening chapters of Genesis in the Bible provide a set of orientations in relation to the world, humanity and God in terms of which the rest of the biblical narrative plays out, so also ideas about the state of nature ground our orientation in the world.
The state of nature acts like a modern, secular creation myth.
So the state of nature is not a quaint philosophical idea, it is alive and well and living in our social imaginary. It shapes who we think we are, what we value, how we treat other people and the world around us, and how we seek to run our economy and our society. It gives us an orientation in navigating fundamental oppositions like order and chaos, the natural and the artificial, anarchy and order.
And, as we will see in future videos, the more we look into it, the more contested and problematic this powerful idea of the state of nature proves itself to be.
[1] Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M Robertson (London: Routledge, 2011) 252.
[2] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chapter II, Paragraph 9.