Original Sin: Part 7, Hobbesian Traps and War in a Malthusian World

Thomas Hobbes has come up a few times the comments to these posts. As well he should as Hobbes' analysis as to why humans exist in a perpetual state of war fits well with the fundamental thesis of these posts.

Why is there so much war?

One could posit, following Original Sin logic, that humans are intrinsically violent. However, one could posit, as Thomas Hobbes did in Leviathan, that humans grow protective and wary in a Malthusian world. This wariness infects interpersonal relationships and scales up to the level of nation states. This international wariness, combined with a desire to protect one's current situation, is the fuel behind war.

To summarize Hobbes' ideas, I'm going to quote from Mark Lilla's review of Hobbes in Lilla's book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (p. 81):

Natural man, according to Hobbes, is desiring man--which also mean he is fearful man. If he finds himself alone in nature we will try to satisfy his desires, will only partially succeed, and will fear losing what he has. But if other human beings are present that fear will be heightened to an almost unbearable degree. Given his awareness of himself as a creature beset by desire--a stream of desire that ends, says Hobbes, only in death--he assumes others are similarly driven. "Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth," Hobbes writes, "he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other men." That means he can think of them only as potential competitors, trying to satisfy desires that may come into conflict with his own.

We can pause here to note that this analysis converges upon Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry discussed in our last post. Hobbes inserts into this milieu of rivalry a fundamental ignorance of other men's motives. That is, we begin by seeing each other as potential competitors. If so, how should I respond? Not knowing your mind or motives (Hobbesian ignorance) I, naturally, assume the worst. I assume that you might steal from me or, worst case, kill me to get what I have. So I begin to arm myself. I buy a gun, dig a moat, build a wall, buy some locks, and hire some spies. You, standing on your side, see all this going on. You see the gun, the wall, the surveillance. And what will be your predictable response? Naturally, you'll buy a gun, dig a moat, build a wall, buy some locks, and hire some spies. And I, on my side, look up to see you doing all this. My assessment as I look over at you? That I was right about you, that I was right to take preemptive measures. So I redouble my efforts. And you redouble your efforts. A feedback loop starts. An arms-race begins. A "cold war" is inaugurated.

This dynamic is called the Hobbesian Trap. And nations easily fall into it. Take, as a modern illustration, the current state of affairs between the United States and Iran. Both countries are locked into the Hobbesian Trap. We don't trust them and they don't trust us. So they are building a bomb. And we don't want them to. We think they are evil and they think we are evil. And God is on both sides.

Is Iran evil? I have no idea. But I do know this, their pursuit of a nuclear weapon is perfectly comprehensible to me. Inside that country a certain Hobbesian logic holds sway as it holds sway inside these American borders.

The point here isn't to get into US foreign policy. It is, rather, to point out the fully predictable and comprehensible tragedy of the situation. We see what is going on but find it very difficult to stop the Hobbesian machinery from churning away.

To summarize all this, we can note that the engine of the Hobbesian nightmare is simple ignorance. I don't know what your motives are. So I assume the worst and arm myself. You do this same.

But ignorance isn't sinfulness nor depravity. It is, as I've repeatedly stated in this series, the consequence of being a finite creature. As Lilla summarizes (p. 82):

That is why the natural social condition of mankind is war--if not explicit, armed hostilities, then a perpetual state of anxious readiness in preparation for conflict. Even the Bible recognizes this tendency. Hobbes asserts: Cain killed his brother not because of an explicit threat but because he feared losing what he had and was ignorant of God's reasons for favoring Abel. Fear, ignorance, and desire are the basic motivations of all human activity, political and religious. One does not have to assume man is fallen, or evil, or possessed by demons to explain why those motivations produce war. One need only understand how these basic motivations combine in the human mind, both when man is alone and when he is in society.

Next Post: Part 8