GE Morton wrote: ↑December 28th, 2021, 2:57 pm
Nonetheless, the suggestion that Native American views on freedom and equality "influenced" European intellectuals is unsupported by the evidence and highly implausible. First, those intellectuals had no access to those alleged views; all they had were interpretations of those views by the few European explorers who by that time had visited the New World. Secondly, the notion that "primitive" people were freer and more materially equal than the inhabitants of civilized societies had been long accepted even before the discovery of the New World --- Europeans having had contact with other "primitive" peoples, in Africa and Asia, since ancient times --- which freedom and equality they attributed to the small size and simplicity of those communities (substantial accumulations of wealth being impossible in hunter-gatherer societies). Finally, there is no evidence that Hobbes, Locke, or their contemporaries were even familiar with those alleged views, much less were influenced by them.
According to Graeber and Wengrow, "travel books" were popular in the 17th century. Many of these -- some written by well-educated French Missionary priests -- contained "dialogues" -- conversations with Native American philosophers. I'll report back when I get a little farther in the book, which definitely sets itself up as opposing the views of Hobbes (and his opposite, Rousseau). Apparently, the Indians thought the Europeans were greedy materialists who obeyed orders and lived in a servile, heirarchical society. Of course, they were right -- but it seemed natural to the Europeans.
I'll see if the authors provide direct evidence of the influence of these books on Hobbes and Locke. From the first two chapters, here's a quote:
.... Attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bonds of humanity... didn't find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend their social arrangements; therefore they were clearly human, vested by God with the powers of reason.
The legal and philosophical question then became what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human -- that is, what rights could they be said to have 'naturally'.... Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius and John Locke skipped past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and began (to ask) what might humans have been like in a state of nature, when all they had was their humanity?
Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies in the Western Hemisphere, and thus concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse.)
The authors then point out that while it may seem natural to us to assume that simple societies were exemplars of primordial times, it was not obvious in the 17th century. On the contrary, they often felt that simple societies had fallen from an ancient civilization, as, of course had happened in Europe.
Graeber and Wengrow suggest that as a result, by the 18th century, the idea of primordial freedom and equality made it seem natural to ask, "What is the origin of INEQUALITY?" This was a question that had seldom been entertained prior to European travel.
By the way, "American", as it was used in those days, referred to Native American (Indian).
for the environment and environmental issues, and this is sadly world-wide.
