Chimpanzees Undermine Individualism
Turns out, the state of nature is a deeply flawed assumption
The state of nature is one of humanity’s most influential abstractions. For generations, it has been the philosophical tool of choice for imagining what life was like before society. Through this thought experiment, Western philosophers have pieced together sophisticated rationales for why humans eventually came together, sacrificed some of our autonomy, and formed groups.
Like all hypotheticals, though, assumptions had to be made. Key liberal thinkers, like Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, agreed that before society, homo sapiens was a solitary creature. Completely divorced from others, Hobbes postulated that in the state of nature life was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Centuries later, Rousseau perpetuated this assumption. He argued that “individuals leave the state of nature by becoming increasingly civilized-that is to say, dependent on one another.”
However, research on one of our closest relative, the chimpanzee, has presented a rather troubling obstacle for the state of nature theory: humans, like chimpanzees, never actually existed in complete isolation.
One researcher writes:
…We share with chimpanzees a “State of Society.” Both humans and chimpanzees have evolved to live collectively. This evolutionary process selected appropriate characteristics for collective life. We can only live in society and we only live through society.
So to envision humans divorced from others, like the state of nature implores, is akin to analyzing chimps as solitary creatures. While that narrow analysis could lead to many discoveries, ultimately that approach would restrict you from fully appreciating the true nature of the species.
Humans are no different. Unfastened from our natural state of codependence, we cease to be human—in the full sense of the term. It seems rather problematic, then, that liberal philosophy, which provides the philosophical framework for our world order, knowingly rejects that evolutionary finding.
How well can we really shape our societies if we cannot first acknowledge that we are working with a deeply flawed assumption—one that is in direct conflict with our evolutionary past?
Paul Rubin, a professor at Emory University, has asked similar questions. He understands that “the state of nature is meant as a metaphor, not as a true statement of primitive conditions,” but concludes that “it is a misleading metaphor.”
While it has been constructive “for some purposes,” the disconnect between our “true original state of humans” and the “hypothesized state of nature” actually “cause confusion rather than enlightenment.”
That realization is not particularly novel. As far back as the early 20th century, the American philosopher John Dewey reasoned that society, and not the individual, should be the starting point for all political philosophy.
Society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case; the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away. Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction.
Dewey’s emphasis on our relationships with others eventually led to a theory called communitarianism. This approach critiques classical liberalists like Hobbes and Rousseau, who fixate on the individual and disregard the complex interactions which determine our moral and social behavior.
Developed fully in the late 1900's, communitarianism is a relatively fresh idea in political philosophy. So far, its proponents have primarily used the theory to criticize John Rawls and his modern interpretation of the state of nature—what he calls “the veil of ignorance.”
Like his ideological forefathers, Rawls creates a hypothetical situation where individuals have no concept of society and their connection to others. Communitarians insist that the veil of ignorance continues liberalism’s long history of discounting the highly social nature of humanity.
It’s easy to see how this critique of classical liberalism could be strengthened by drawing upon research in primatology and evolutionary science. Yet, here’s the rub: there are almost no analyses which adopt this interdisciplinary approach. That seems like a huge missed opportunity, because the potential arguments stemming from this exciting combination appear enticing—and rather devastating for classical liberalism.
Such an approach has probably been neglected in political theory for a couple of reasons. First, humanities professors probably don’t appreciate having their well-regarded assumptions criticized by those who study chimps for a living. Second, we humans like to think of ourselves as a cut above the rest. To compare primate societies to our complex world is insulting.
That sort of intellectual rigidity is a real shame. The state of nature has undoubtedly supplied humans with the philosophical foundation for some of our greatest societal developments. Through it, we have agreed upon unprecedented political and moral rights and which governments can best protect these rights. It is an incredibly powerful concept which altered human societies for the better.
It is counterproductive, however, to clutch to this idea too closely, thereby spurning a modern and scientific argument which could produce a more realistic diagnosis of human interests.
After all, as Michal Bang Petersen and Lene Aarøe ask, “is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human political mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?”
