Strong Words on Columbus Day: Prehistoric North America, what was the state of the state?

Much can be made out of a comparison of Rousseau's credulous anthropological notions (in the state of nature man is an honorable and moral "Noble Savage") and contemporary "hippie" narratives describing a native "utopia" that once existed in prehistoric North America.  

Against Rousseau, Hobbes's famous formulation paints a picture of an "ignoble" savage, indeed.  Hobbes famously describes a brutal "state of nature" in the Leviathan:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no Culture of the Earth, no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea, no commodious Building, no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force, no Knowledge of the face of the Earth, no account of Time, no Arts, no Letters, no Society, and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short . . .

                                                             (Leviathan, i. xiii. 9)

I think it is safe to say that rather than an "anthropologically accurate" description of the state of nature, Hobbes is describing the harsh realpolitik that characterized the behavior of the European Monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,  and which saw some violent "ramp up" in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation; though as for that, medieval Europe was pretty brutal as well. Because of these anthropological and historical "truisms," says Hobbes, human beings are in need of a superintending authority. This was a dictatorship beholding to nothing but the "social contract" that required the dictator to uphold authority and civil order; otherwise, the dictator could do what ever he wanted to do.  Importantly, human nature was such--people were crazy avaricious robots, so to speak--that they had no good in them at all.  Goodness and thus morality had to be imposed upon them from above. And we will set aside the many contradictions in Hobbes for some other discussion. 

Against Hobbes, Locke offered an alternate view of human nature in which the state of nature is marked by "good  intentions" corrupted by greed, human foibles, bad faith actors, malicious intent, institutional "mission creep", and tyrants who do not respect peoples' rights and property.  Human beings naturally recognize other peoples' rights, but corruption and greed lead some people to take other people's property and infringe upon other peoples' rights.  The "social contract," as such, is the effort of people of good faith to create magisterial and legislative powers that can best protect peoples' property and their rights.    

Such anyway is my preface to this interesting passage I saw the other day, and which outlines a fairly sobering picture of the state of the state in prehistoric North America. The following excerpt is from an article by Tyler Durden. No doubt his sketch of life in prehistoric North America is controversial, but also, alas, essentially true.  Indeed, a proper anthropological inquiry of prehistoric North America will confirm these outlines:

When the European colonists came to America, there was nothing.  No nation existed.  No enduring infrastructure, no sweeping societies, no system of subsistence.  There was a scattering of primitive tribes engaged in constant war with each other for centuries.  Genocide was common.  Slavery was common.  Even cannibalism was common.  The "Native Americans" were not "native", they took the land from the tribes that came before them.

In fact, many weaker tribes would turn to the European colonists for help to stop stronger tribes from wiping them out.  

In the old world, colonialism and conquest was required to prevent barbarians from crashing through the gates and simply taking what the colonials had built.  As far as slavery is concerned, every civilization in existence including the "indigenous Americans" participated in slavery. 

    Source

I should be remiss if I failed to point out that the world view and theory of human nature driving Durden's sketch evidently supports Hobbes "dark" views, though Locke also admits that in the state of nature people can be terribly violent, corrupt, and so on. Essentially, however, Locke acknowledges that human beings are capable of reason and that therefore it is human beings and not tyrants who should draw up governments. Locke's views (and Hobbes's?) as well as Durden's compare to Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, 1851; The Confidence-Man, 1850); William Golding (Lord of the Flies, 1954)... History evidently supports Durden's sketch.  As for prehistoric Central and South America? I suspect the situation was even more harsh. Compare Europe--prehistoric, Classical, Medieval, and Modern.

More on Hobbes and Locke?  Please click HERE.

Still from Lord of the Flies (1990)