As I have mentioned, Hobbes, in Leviathan, and Ayn Rand share the important central assumption that we live in a "war of all against all", but they differ over what to do about it. Hobbes wants to control this war by stern despotic government while Rand wants, so far as possible, to get rid of government altogether. We may not find either prescription convincing. So might there perhaps be something wrong with the assumption itself?
We are so used to the phrase "war of all against all" that we scarcely notice its oddity. But it is actually very odd, because the word war essentially denotes something exceptional, a kind of emergency. When politicians now claim to be "at war" during what is actually peacetime, they do it to excuse actions that would normally be thought wrong. This, they are saying, is a crisis in which normal standards are suspended. But that claim only makes sense against a background where those standards do apply, a normal life that gives meaning to the exception.
Obviously, too, talking of war contrasts our enemy sharply with our friends and allies, towards whom we now feel unusual warmth. As Darwin rightly remarked:
It is no argument against savage man being a social animal that the tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other, for the social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species.
Though his "almost always" is an exaggeration, Darwin is plainly right here. Humans are like other social animals in that their hostility to outsiders is the flipside of strong friendliness towards their own group. The distinction between friends and enemies is as central to human life as it is to the lives of wolves, meerkats and chimpanzees. Yet Hobbes's formula treats both these distinctions as mere invented, artificial devices. In a state of nature, he says, there is equal and unchanging hostility to all. The selective, co-operative friendliness which we normally see is just an institution, a safety-measure devised by our intellects, something comparable to the rule of the road.
Some other early theorists as well as Hobbes gave this strictly intellectual explanation of human sociability. Assuming that people had once been solitary, they asked "how, then, did they ever get together?" They too thought this must have been due to intelligent planning, so that, as somebody put it, language must have been invented by a congress of hitherto speechless elders who had agreed to assemble and determine the rules of grammar … But this does not sound very plausible.
If, however, you look at the issue zoologically instead, as Darwin did, you see a different picture at once. Homo Sapiens does not exist in isolation. He (or she) is just one in a wide spectrum of other social species. The inborn sociability that they all share actually provides the only context within which the development of language could ever have become possible. Speech is an invention which only makes sense for creatures who are already intensely sociable – creatures who already communicate eagerly – but who need to do it better. And, suitably enough, our immediate neighbours on that spectrum are indeed the great apes, who, like other primates, are well-known for their rich variety of social interaction. It would have been an extraordinary evolutionary step if, in this situation, our species had reverted to the simpler, ego-bound emotional constitution that suits a crocodile.
This, however, has important consequences. It means that the intellect of which we are so proud is not really our prime mover. It is not the inventor of our social nature. Instead, it is a later, benign outgrowth and instrument of that nature. Before we are thinkers, we are lovers and haters, creatures deeply aware of those around us and fully integrated into their life. As soon as we start to think, our thoughts draw their force from those rich flows of natural feeling. Our intellect enriches them further by helping to shape them – not by despotically ruling them.
Early enlightenment thinkers, however, were so horrified by the confusions of their age that they thought reason must be put in sole charge to clear up the mess on the simplest possible set of premisses. By doing this they produced a set of dazzlingly simple philosophical maps which still influence us today – world-pictures, or rather world-diagrams, each of which centres on some serious truth, but stresses it so one-sidedly as to end up by distorting it. And, as individualism has developed, Hobbes's egoistic psychological diagram has been one of the most influential of these.
Those thinkers cannot, of course, be blamed for failing to see the evolutionary considerations which, as I have just suggested, radically undermine Hobbes's account of human motivation. They had not been told about these things. But today we have, and I find it really strange that Darwin's speculations in The Descent of Man, exploring ways in which we can try to understand our social nature, should have been so widely ignored, even by those who claim to follow him. In the last essay in this series I shall briefly outline those speculations.