If you read any of the classics of Enlightenment political philosophy - thinkers like John Locke, Thomas
Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau - you'll come across the idea of the State
of Nature. A hypothetical time way back in human history when humans had no laws,
no governments, no rules, no property, no social contracts: no social organisation of any kind. Hobbes famously
said that in the State of Nature there was a war of every man against every man, and
human life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The purpose of thinking about the State of Nature is to explore questions like, "How
do we get governments? Where do ideas of laws and property and economy come from? How do people agree on rules to live by?
Even though no such state actually ever existed
because we know early humans were social animals, it's still a useful thought experiment to help philosophers
think about society and power.
But this is Philosophy Tube. And if you want that basic level sh*t you can go back to Wikipedia.
So strap yourself in because we're about to get interdisciplinary up in here.
In their book "How the West Came to Rule" historians Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu say
the idea that humans advance from a "State of Nature" to a "more developed"
stage was extremely convenient to Enlightenment thinkers, because of this. America. "The New World."
The land and resources of the New World presented enormous economic opportunity to Western European
countries between the 15th and 19th Centuries. In particular, England and Holland got very
wealthy from the colonies and used that wealth to become what they are today. There was just
one problem. There were already people living there.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas had different ways of doing things: different
cultures, different laws, different ideas about government and property. For example, some
tribes were nomadic: rather than stay in one place and farm they moved around and hunted
but rather than see that as a different relationship to the land, Europeans interpreted that as
"they're not using it." Difference was interpreted as absence. A blank
canvas. A State of Nature.
European colonisers were so convinced that their culture was rational and universally grounded that
when confronted by different cultures they saw them as simple, primitive, and justifiably
exploitable. And that exploitation took the form of genocide; mass executions; torture; displacement;
gendered forced labour according to which men were enslaved and women were made to be maids and wives, denied
access to land and water that they had previously been free to use; and the banning of indigenous
forms of language, culture, art, science, on charge of devil worship
and witchcraft, and on pain of death. And the money rolled in.
And while all this was going on, philosophers like John Locke were saying that
Indigenous Americans had no property and had no government or and
lived in the "State of Nature." He explicitly defined land that isn't
being actively cultivated as "vacant." When actually, as we just saw, the land was being
used and lived on, just in a different way. Locke says that Indigenous Americans had
no government because they didn't have centralised authority or representative democracy. When actually,
to name just one example the First Nation Mi'kmaq people of Canada had a political structure
called the Awitkativitik, which dates from the tenth century. But nope, according to John Locke
that doesn't count as a government. Difference interpreted as absence.
The philosopher Adam Ferguson was a big fan of the idea of "human progress," the idea that society doesn't
just change over time but actually gets better. And that European Western models
of society were the best and the most advanced, because they didn't
go to war as much and didn't oppress women. Which is kindof ironic, given the gendered forced labour we
talked about. And also indof ironic given that war with the Ottoman Empire was partially what fuelled Western European
expansionism into the Atlantic in the first place. But again - difference interpreted as absence, as something lacking.
And conveniently, Locke benefitted financially from all of this: he was secretary to Lord Shaftesbury,
who was himself Secretary to the Lord Proprietors of Carolina; secretary to the Council of Trade
and Plantations; a member of the Board of Trade; a investor in the Royal Africa Company,
which Britain used to buy slaves from West Africa; an investor in the Company of Merchant
Adventurers to Trade with the Bahamas; and Locke owned land in Carolina, where indigenous
people were enslaved for the profit of white Europeans like him.
So philosophers like Locke who were talking about the State of Nature weren't just pulling
it out of their asses: they was drawing on contemporary legal and political realities,
and particular interpretations of those realities that they stood to profit from. A lot of contemporary legal cases
used similar arguments to Locke. For instance, in Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut,
the defence for the colonial government of Connecticut said that only sedentary
agriculture counted as "using the land" that made it property, i.e. that nomadic hunting practices did not count.
In his article "Rediscovering America," the philosopher James Tully writes that defining government and property in Eurocentric ways
allowed colonialist powers to imagine that there was no property and there was no government in America,
it was a a blank canvas, a State of Nature that they could move into, use as they saw fit - without asking.
The State of Nature was never just a hypothetical idea
that never left the universities; it was sanitised intellectual racism that colonialist Europeans were only
too happy to pick up and run with. And these ideas had a big impact after
Locke as well: his book, "Two Treatises of Government," was cited in or influenced numerous 19th
and 18th Century legal cases over indigenous land, especially that so-called "agricultural argument."
Whole new ideas of sovereignty and statehood
were developed just to justify murder and theft: ultimately the English government decided
that sovereignty was to be determined by effective occupation, i.e. that whoever could control
resources through military might was their rightful owner. An idea that still persists today
in international law. As late as 1989 the Appeals Court of Ontario was not accepting
testimony from the oral tradition of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai people: in considering an appeal
over Ontario's destruction of ancient forests on their land, the court would
only look at written documents, an obvious hamper to societies that use a lot of oral tradition!
Difference interpreted as absence.
There's been a persistent assumption on the part of successive Canadian governments
that First Nation ownership of land is something that the First Nations have to prove;
that unless they can prove otherwise, the land belongs to Canada, and they can sell it to developers.
Rather than assume that they probably know which lands are theirs because they've
been living on them for thousands of years. That comes from the old State of Nature idea,
according to which nobody owns the land and it's Ok to move in and take it unless anybody can prove that
it belongs to them; as we've seen, the standards of proof required are heavily weighted in favour of European socities.
First Nation Canadians are still fighting for their land and their lives against
political and legal systems that are stacked against them because they've inherited that bad philosophy.
Anievas and Nisancioglu write, "In this context, the associated 'state of nature'
discourse was not an empirical observation, or an innocent thought experiment. It was
rather a colonial(ist) construct born out of the culture wars waged - and ultimately
won-...in the name of colonial exploitation." "The concomitant exclusion of indigenous
people from the 'social contract' and the perceived inability of 'backward'
countries to govern has in turn been central to legitimising external rule over them - a
practice that continues to this day."
It's because this bad philosophy is still around that we can't just abstract it away
from this context. It's always tempting with Enlightenment philosophers like John Stuart Mill and John Locke
to forget that the work they produced was made in and helped create horrific circumstances.
It's only by acknowledging those limits and interrogating that context that we can allow ourselves to create better
philosophy in future.
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