Government_role

This book has been on my list for a long time, as it could be considered one of the most influential texts in shaping the western world. Written in 1651 Hobbes gives his views on political philosophy and touches on almost everything else along the way. Ghosts, validity of scripture, hell and truth. The central tenant of the book is his view on men in a “state of nature” which is synonymous with the state of “war of all against all”. He famously said that in this state “life of man, (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” The book is broken into 4 parts and the first deals with this as well as an overview of Hobbes’ philosophic framework with which he is operating. Hobbes is a materialist and Christian in that way a sort of relic of his time. He discounts all events supernatural excepting a small handful which God did during biblical times. In the first part of the book, he describes man as a machine, tossing the platonic idea of soul out the window as silly. His logic is incisive and leaves little room for grey areas. In some ways it feels like you are indulging a senile old man who still believes that truth can be got at by “precise” definitions and clear statements, but on the other hand, it is hard to knock the man’s models as we live in a world partially built by him. If nothing else, he seemed to have a clear view of human nature. The crux of this book is that he believes (much like Sam Harris) that it is best to start considering political philosophy from the worst-case scenario. To him the worst-case scenario is a state of nature. This means that any government, no matter how tyrannical is preferable to the state of nature and therefore all efforts should tend towards preserving governments. To Hobbes a government at its core is always representational. A group of people agree to give up their right of ruling to a person or group of persons in order to avoid the state of nature. The person or group of persons is the embodiment of the people (book’s cover photo), otherwise known as the commonwealth. This brings about some other interesting conclusions from Hobbes’. Again, viewing the world in black and white terms, he believes you are either part of the commonwealth or not. If you are, then you agree to give up your representation to whoever your leader is. Since you’ve done this, you (and everyone in the commonwealth) could be considered to be the authors of the leader’s actions. This in turn means that the sovereign cannot do anything considered unjust as like God, justice is defined by the sovereign and the sovereign owns the agency of the subjects. To be brief Hobbes feels that the worst thing in the world is to be in a state of anarchy and the best defense against that is a strong united government, otherwise known as the leviathan. Something that everyone works to preserve to make it as difficult as possible to kill. Whatever consequences the ruler imposes the subjects should consider worthy sacrifices to avoid the state of nature. He finishes the book by trying to couch his principles in Biblical terms. He, unperturbed by the millions of scholars before him, wades into the murky depths of exegesis and comes out on the other end with his political philosophy intact. I was quite glad to finish this one as the last half was quite dry and I thought a little pointless as once a person with a brain turns 16, they stop being convinced by other people’s readings of scripture. I will say that his incisive logic did not sleep on religious matters either though as he brought up some really good problems overlooked by many. Like this thought on divine inspiration: ...

This book sets out to demonstrate how violence over history is on a downward trajectory and that we currently live in the least violent time in history by almost every metric. This is very counter intuitive considering we have gotten so efficient at killing people; indeed, we have invented weapons capable of wiping out the human race, but they have yet to be used. The future is a little more optimistic than it appears at first glance. This book starts by outlining various trends he found of violence that has drastically been reduced. For example, homicide, war, torture, executions, and lynching have all been in decline for some time. In the next section he talks about 5 factors that contribute to these declines. The first factor is “The Leviathan” borrowing the term from Thomas Hobbes who argues that even though governments are somewhat arbitrary they nonetheless decrease violence on the overall. The second factor contributing to peace is the concept of commerce. As they say, “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”. Thirdly he attributes the feminization of culture as a cause for the drop in violence. He draws some very interesting correlations between cultures of honor and violence that I hadn’t thought of before. Honor much like a religious ideal can be inflated to infinite proportions leading to tiny insults being cause for a duel to the death. He then draws parallels between the duels of gentlemen from the past and gang violence in the present, showing how the motivation behind the violence is similar, it is just that one had been romanticized more. The ultimate example of this “honor” oriented violence is the era of chivalry. As women stopped being property to be fought over like oil or gold, many of these types of honor-based violence have decreased. Women also tend to be less aggressive on the whole, for example women are less likely to vote for hawkish foreign policy when compared to men. So as their ability to contribute and influence society has grown so too has their more peaceful ideas. The fourth cause in the decrease of violence is cosmopolitanism. He cites the printing press as having an outsized effect on people’s perceptions of other people. Crediting novels as the medium that allowed people for the first time to see the world from a different perspective. Doing this allowed people to feel the pain of others in ways that were not possible before literacy. The final reason he cites is what he labels “The escalator of reason”. He argues that enlightenment and humanist traditions have been the most successful tool in humanity’s arsenal for decreasing violence. To put it simply, if you believe in logic when you ask someone not to hurt you, by extension you also must apply the same logic to see that they themselves don’t want to be hurt. Thusly expanding our circles of consideration and integration. This book is well written, fairly easy to digest. It is full of interesting anecdotes and statistics that Pinker marshals to back his various claims. I enjoyed it, although I feel as if the book could have been shortened by a fair bit without sacrificing on content. There is some controversy as to his way of counting war violence to come away with the results he did, but no one can argue that violence has been restrained quite a bit since the Middle Ages. Especially when you consider the spine-chilling methods of executions and tortures employed and the complete lack of consideration for the welfare of humans that don’t look like you.