jpahmad Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 I don't understand Pinker. He has a lot of sensible things to offer to the discussion of human nature. In "The Better Angels of our Nature" he writes about 900 pages worth of an account on how humans have become progressively less violent and empathetic over the course of the last two millennium. He points to the Enlightenment and the "humanitarian revolution" as the pinnacle of human evolution where the western world broke free of the chains of mysticism and embraced reason and the scientific method. But then, at the end of it all, he claims that Hobbes Leviathan is needed permanently or else mankind will just slaughter each other in a barbaric fashion like they did 10,000 years ago. What?! Please someone explain this too me. He makes his claim around the 6 minute mark.
Anuojat Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 Fear of others would be my guess. The state is to many artificially molded together or of both the politics and rest of human developement. AKA schools, medicine, academia, police and so on. I dont know why specifically he beliefs the state is necceriry but id wager a guess that lumps all progress of mankind that he speaks of to agencies not induviduals acting by themselves. Which is absolute and total contradiction. Its like treating humans being as morally fragile creatures which at moments notice in the absence of the state will jsut revert to rabid wolves like domesticated dogs. And in that scenario the wolves arents even as bad... :S AKA it seems he is also speaking humans as if our nature was to be in the absence of rulers like unruly children! XD
Wuzzums Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 He's an academic. He gets paid through the state. In his mind he can't be the bad guy, therefore him accepting the stolen money is moral and necessary. Or it could be he is incapable of realizing there are other humans out there in a democracy that don't have it as good as him, which is like a staple of modern academia. "I'm living well therefore the world is fair and just". "I'm poor because of ridiculous laws and taxes therefore I'm living in an Orwellian nightmare".
ProfessionalTeabagger Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 Well he's wrong because the government itself is still subject to exactly the same forces of "human nature". It's just special pleading. Great thinkers often get very lazy when faced with this question of government. We are all primed from a young age to overlook blatant contradictions around coercive authority.
bootoo Posted July 16, 2015 Posted July 16, 2015 He also makes claims about pre-historic hunter/gatherer groups using contemporary non-hunter/gatherer groups as examples
GRosado Posted July 17, 2015 Posted July 17, 2015 He used to be anarchist but he said the moment that changed him was the riots in Montreal when the police went on strike basically at a certain time the police would stop working & he believed that people would still act lawful but clearly from the word riot they didn't.
jpahmad Posted July 20, 2015 Author Posted July 20, 2015 He used to be anarchist but he said the moment that changed him was the riots in Montreal when the police went on strike basically at a certain time the police would stop working & he believed that people would still act lawful but clearly from the word riot they didn't. He used to be an anarchist? Where did you get that info?
GRosado Posted July 20, 2015 Posted July 20, 2015 He used to be an anarchist? Where did you get that info? He talks about it in the Blank Slate book. He says he was a follower of the Anarchist thought of Bakunin.
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