308: The State of Gaming Nature

[Gildan Bladeborn]

The whole, "all humans are inherently bad" comes from that obstinate culture of statism. Leviathan was representative of the rational discourse in those days, ranging from Mercantilism to the prevalence of the Church.

Hobbes was an idiot, and should be seen the same way Marxian economics is seen.

Um, no.

Humans ARE inherently bad. Greed and murder is who we are, and we can see it every time that society's bounds are loosened. People in Rwanda hacked their neighbours and their schoolmates to death with machetes not because they were ordered to, but simply because they were ALLOWED to. The second the Leviathan took its leave from the former Yugoslavia, men were raping their co-workers' daughters. The second regulations became so low that bankers could get away with fraud on a trillion-dollar scale, they did, and ruint millions of people and entire countries.

That is what we are. History is rather full of examples of this. Pretty much every problem in political discourse since, well, Rousseau is that we substitute idealistic bullshit like his for this simple yet inconvenient truth.

Well said - "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is a happy little pipe dream, but the unavoidable reality that idealists blind themselves to is that humans are nasty. When it comes to the "functioning" members of society, at best we convince ourselves to feel ashamed for the terrible thoughts we entertain and therefore out of that instilled shame do not act upon them (much), at worst we simply recognize that "being ourselves" just isn't worth the possible consequences that behavior would entail; either way we're holding our own "real" nature in check, every minute of every day.

Take away the learned guilt or remove those consequences that hold us in check, and the result isn't very pretty. Humans are certainly capable of remarkable acts of charity, kindness, and love of course, but we exhibit those traits in defiance of our natures, not in accordance with them, thanks to our capacity for reason; reason that both frees us and condemns us with the same stroke, for when we act in accordance with our wicked natures we cannot argue that we didn't have a choice not to.

Building any sort of model based on the assumption that humans are basically good is a doomed endeavor - the "noble savage" is and has always been a myth.

 

[Mortons4ck]

A brilliant pieces. It's articles like this that keep me coming back to the Escapist.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Oh, and evolutionary psychology. Cute. You might want to pick a source less agenda-driven than Dawkins, he makes Rousseau look almost honest.

Well, we certainly know on which side your bread is buttered. Jonah Goldberg-like typing detected.

You do know that Rousseau sent all of his kids into foster care because they disturbed his work, right? Every idealist is a hypocrite; he has to be.

...and your point is? He was an 18th Century aristocrat, that's what they did. Rousseau also wrote Emile and drew the unflinching, eternal enmity of the feminist community, was probably paranoid schizophrenic, and had a nun fetish. Kant was an obsessive-compulsive hermit. Marx lived off his wife's wealth. Thomas Jefferson raped at least one of his slaves, and John Adams was probably the only founding father who didn't beat his wife. Doesn't change the content or quality of their work, or the times in which they lived, in the least. Argumenta ad hominem and ad odium are pro, yo.

If you seriously think Rousseau was a starry-eyed idealist, you're sorely in need of a more in-depth reading of his work. Romantic, yes as befits the period, but idealist not by a longshot. To wit:

Culture, at its core, is force [...] Noble savages, my arse.

That was Rousseau's entire goddamned point. The difference between the "noble savage" and the "civilized human" is reason and with it, language, which mediates and dampens empathy, mutual respect, and equality of big-N-as-the-social-contractualists-understood-it Nature. Congratulations, in the course of attempting to debunk Rousseau you inadvertently used his own argument, albeit much less eloquently. Not convinced?

Spoiler: Warning, may contain actual quotes from Rousseau

"We conclude, then, that the savage man, wandering in the forests, without work, without speech, without a home, without war, and without relationships, was equally without any need of his fellow men and without any desire to hurt them, perhaps not even recognizing any one of them individually."

-Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality. Penguin Classics, copyright 1984, page 104. Emphasis mine.

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying 'this is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society."

-Ibid, page 109. Emphasis mine.

Labeling Rousseau an idealist for his teleology is a rhetorical ploy by his critics in lack of a more viable, or substantive, argument against his theory. You may as well call Ayn Rand idealist as well, as she was a "theorist" who envisioned a utopian society which was the final cause of all which came before as well.

Also, sidenote:

Also, just so I can reach the link singularity, here's a libertarian perspective on the "Wild" west (It's TL;DR, so just check out some Bullet-points; and read the whole thing if you're interested.)

Seriously, the Ludwig von Mises Institute? Blech. You know what classical economic liberalism and "neoliberalism" got us? One Great Depression, one S&L crisis, and one Great Recession (in the last century alone). No thanks.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Yeah, no. And I really take offence at being thrown in with some American republican Bible-thumper. My point was that Dawkins, being 60% agenda, 30% self-aggrandisement, and 10% human, wasn't really a great choice when making an argument in a discussion already filled with agenda.

Sorry, but dismissing Dawkins out of hand due to a perceived agenda, which is an entirely meaningless statement considering anyone who engages in normative discussion has one and that's the very point, then proceeding to lump Rousseau in with not only Marx (which is on its own not a poor comparison, though I'd argue Marx owes far more to Hegel than Rousseau, with the latter's influence on Marx being ancillary) but among the greatest criminals against humanity the 20th Century has to offer for what you perceive to be idealism, tends to trigger ye olde deductive bullshit detector.

But I guess that demanding personal integrity is the equivalent of an ad hominem attack to you.

Of course, there's also the issue of people being of their times and accepting societal foibles without allowing those things to detract from the meaning of their work. But hey, if you want to start throwing philosophers out because they might have been assholes or engaged in assholish behavior, that's certainly your prerogative.

I mean shit, Aristotle thought women weren't even human in any meaningful sense of the word but let's not hold that against him shall we?

The obvious and manifest difference, of course (and one which you choose to ignore), that I consider that force to be a force for good, whereas he extols the virtues of solipsism and considers the "citizen" to be the polar opposite of the "man". As well he should know, pampered, whingey ponce that he was - oh, wait, I'm insulting the great man by stating facts again, damn.

And again, you've entirely stripped Rousseau of the vital context of his state of nature. Rousseau himself never used the term "noble savage", by the way -- Voltaire applied it to Rousseau's work to ridicule it. Rousseau's state of nature was not any real iteration of men, past or present, and not intended to be such. His state of nature was a thought experiment to illustrate man without reason or language. In other words, animals.

The entire body of Rousseau's work, notably The Social Contract, was how social and cultural forces could be used for good, whereas in the past and present are for evil, through the enactment of the General Will (which he envisioned as simply the rule of law).

My entire point is that the savage isn't, and never has been, noble, as any anthropologist will gladly tell you. "Without war", indeed. It's wishful thinking, a silly mirage used to illustrate a point which is, well, not just counter-intuitive, but so logically unsound that it makes Marx's conclusions (as opposed to his observations) look positively rooted in reality. I'm not much of a fan of philosophies based on mirages and fallacies; they tend to neglect the "what is" for the "what should be".

...and here you've managed to condemn all social contractualists. It may come as a surprise to you that all contractualists, from Hobbes straight through to Rawls and his original position, used the state of nature as a thought experiment to illustrate their normative arguments. The thought experiment is not, nor ever was (except for Aristotle who argued society was man's state of nature) intended to be literal. We can argue over whose conceptualization of the state of nature is the closest to actual human nature all day, but that doesn't change the fact the state of nature is a fiction regardless who used it.