I'm reading Leviathan by Hobbes. I previously read about Hobbes in Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God, and now I'm reading the original. I won't blog everything because it's a dense work. Surprisingly readable, but nonetheless dense, in that many points are made in a paragraph and then it moves on. With so many bases covered, there's no way I could blog the whole thing.
As Lilla said, Hobbes approaches problems of society in terms of human nature and what will work, rather than as an effort to discern the mind of the creator and impose those insights on society. So the first 100+ pages (in this edition) are all about human nature and behavior and words and knowledge and rhetoric and, um, well, everything. I obviously won't blog all of it, but I want to note a few points that stood out:
Chapter 2, section 2: He states the law of inertia a few decades before Newton. In terms of political philosophy the point here is that people change in response to either internal processes or external stimuli, i.e. there is always a cause for people's changes. This is important to his later arguments about how to control people.
But as a physicist, it's interesting that he was aware of this. I confess to knowing far less than I should about the origins of the Law of Inertia. Apparently it was known to philosophers decades before Newton's Principia, and already used for analogies.
Chapter 2, section 8: He says that he doesn't believe in witchcraft, but he thinks many witches believe that they have real powers, and they seek to cause mischief, so they deserve punishment. Also, if people were less superstitious and hence less fearful of witches and other potential supernatural threats in the community, they'd be more obedient to civil authority.
His approval of punishing witches for civil good is not terribly surprising from what I previously knew about him. His point about how less superstitious people would be more orderly is an interesting one, however. In general, people who have less fear of their neighbors are less prone to vigilantism, but are also less drawn to "law and order" figures.
Chapter 8, section 1: Virtue requires inequality. "For if all things were equal in all men, nothing would be prized." I am unsure whether modern egalitarians fail to grasp this or grasp it perfectly.
Chapter 8, section 26: He makes the same point that Galileo made: The Scripture was written to teach us about morality and salvation, not to teach us about the motion of the heavens. He was a contemporary of Galileo, and according to a footnote actually met Galileo, so I should not be surprised here.
Chapter 9, section 48: "...honour consisteth only in the opinion of power. Therefore the ancient heathen did not think they dishonoured, but greatly honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their poems, committing rapes, thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts." I've noted before that polytheistic divinities showcase human flaws rather than enjoying a monopoly on morality. Hobbes has a different take, arguing that even these polytheistic deities are honoured rather than seen as cautionary tales. I have to ponder that. It's certainly true that the Old Testament God acts in ways that would raise eyebrows if a human did it, but his moral monopoly grants Him license.
Chapter 11, section 25: Curiosity drives people to seek for causes and causes of causes, until eventually they postulate a deity as the ultimate cause. This is related to the point Lilla made, that religion in politics provides a sure foundation. God is the ultimate postulate. Take that away and people are adrift.
I think this might also explain why many ideologues of non-theistic sorts (e.g. Marxists, Critical Race Theorists, atheists who have gotten a little TOO excited about not having a lord and savior) behave in ways that often resemble religion: They have a foundation, something that scratches the same psychological itch, so they behave in a similar way.
