Global Dialogues

Thomas Hobbes, a pillar of modern political philosophy, famously set forth an argument for government based on a fundamental distrust of human nature. In fact, in his famous Leviathan from the mid-seventeenth century, Hobbes described a pre-civilization “state of nature” as a place where our worst selves existed:

In such condition there is no place for industry, ... no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In this blanket invocation of societies framed upon little but violence and lassitude, Hobbes checks multiple boxes for his overall argument that humans are inherently untrustworthy by nature and thus will always require coercive governance to get us to engage in any upwardly mobile and prosocial behaviors.

First, Hobbes relegates earlier human societies to the dustbin of history by casting them as incapable of maintaining order and progress, and lacking any impetus toward social cohesion or collective striving. This flies in the face of reality, however, as myriad earlier societies (including then—and now—existing indigenous cultures) were in fact incredibly dynamic and evolved many keen insights about the world.

Second, Hobbes instantiates a version of human nature that continues to pervade everything from social stratification and militarization to unsustainable resource usage and the prison-industrial complex. Hobbes wired a penchant for cruelty into the human animal and the social systems we had created along the way, presenting a case for management of negative tendencies rather than real redemption.

In this formulation, our worst instincts have become the animating premise of many of our societies. The “social contract” Hobbes propounded is actually an anti-social one, promising little more than a cat-and-mouse game between governmental coercion and human malfeasance. In essence, it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy where systems purporting to hedge against brutality deploy those very means.

Still, despite the penchant for dismissing other cultures and fostering structures whose reference point is the worst of our natures, these theories cannot be dismissed out of hand. If we are seeking evidence that humankind is cruel and brutish, we don’t have to look far down the news queue. The issue isn’t so much that Hobbes was wrong about what people are capable of, but more so that he only saw the glass half-empty. Humans then and now have also been remarkably resilient, empathetic, and cooperative.

So the next time you catch that clarion call of cruelty taking hold, try pressing pause for a moment and ask yourself a different question: where do we see people striving to be better and caring for one another? Rewiring the baseline narrative can help us reconnect to ourselves, each other, and the world.

Randall J. Amster is a teaching professor, director of the environmental studies program, and co-director of the joint environment and sustainability degree at Georgetown University.