Hobbesian thought sometimes appears in unexpected places and it is usually quite revealing when it does. The post in question the comment is related to can be described as “how to financially incentivise the production of children”. An interesting piece it contains many of the problems I have with this brand of thinking, but perhaps the comment in question best sums it up. So let us have it in full:
Sorry, but everyone here claiming that it’s not about money and “people naturally want to have children” are believing what they want to be true instead of what actually is true. Cultural Marxism has liberated us from all the old traditions, religious strictures, and taboos – and in doing so, it has unmasked us; it has shown the world what we are like when we are free to follow our nature. What we see, if we are honest with ourselves, is not just disillusioning, but downright sickening.
Over the past 250 years, we’ve seen one movement or political system after another fail because it based itself on a fundamentally inaccurate (and always overly optimistic) model of human nature. The heart of reaction – of a call for a return of the authority of the priests and kings from which the men of the Enlightenment sought to free themselves – is that, having seen clearly what happens when mankind’s chains are broken, we reject romantic notions, and call for all the old chains to be repaired and placed right back where they were – even if we are as restrained by them as everyone else. (As the line from Elizabeth Bowden’s “The Heat of the Day” goes: “Who could want to be free when they can be strong? Freedom, what a slaves’ yammer! We must have law ⎯ if necessary let it break us.”)
No more romantic illusions. Here’s some hard reality: People don’t really naturally want to have children, and certainly not more than one or two. People do what they think they are expected to (i.e. what the chains of tradition and taboo placed on them guide them toward). People respond to incentives, including (or perhaps especially) money. If we want people to have more children, we need to shift the balance of incentives and punishments back in favor of them doing so.
We can’t afford to wallow in happy wishy thinking.
It’s easy to see where Hobbes rears his head here. The assertion that Cultural Marxism is not about enslavement and leading people off the true path, rather the author sees it as liberation. As do the Marxists themselves of course. It is through this we reveal our true human nature which is depravity and hedonism. That it attempts to return us to a ‘state of nature’.
This is a rather binary position to take – either humans must have laws and strict governance or they revert to a state of nature and all the evil it entails. Michael Gillespie in his book “The Theological Origins of Modernity” has much to say about Hobbes and his role in modernity.
However, one cannot abandon God without turning man into a beast, and one can- not abandon man without falling into theological fanaticism.
The two great strains of modern thought that begin respectively with Descartes and Hobbes seek to reconstruct the world not as a human artifact or a divine miracle but as a natural object. They disagree, however, about the nature and place of God and man in the world as they open it up. For Descartes, man is in part a natural being, but he is also in part divine and is thus distinguished from nature and free from its laws. For Hobbes, man is thoroughly natural and thus free only in a sense compatible with universal natural causality.
Hobbes is at the heart of modernity for Gillespie, alongside “Galileo, Bacon, Descartes”. This is not a trivial point or argument: the metaphysics upon which Hobbes operates sit at odds to the ones of those who came before him. Indeed in making any claims about being a reactionary it would appear rejection of the nominalism should be present. Accepting Hobbes and agreeing with his observations about humanity and nature seems to go against that.
Returning to Gillespie again (because he puts it better than I ever could):
Hobbes has a more limited view of human capacities than Descartes. Man for Hobbes is a piece of nature, a body in motion. Like the nominalists, Hobbes believes that this motion is not teleologically determined, but in contrast to them he sees it not as random but as mechanical. It neither realizes its essence in Aristotelian fashion, nor is it attracted to a natural end by love or beauty, but is pushed ever onward by collisions with other individual objects. Man is therefore moved not by his intrinsic natural impulses, nor by divine inspiration or free will, but by a succession of causal motions. In contrast to Descartes, Hobbes does not see human beings rising above nature. Humans are rather thoroughly natural objects that obey the laws of nature. According to these laws that govern all matter, each of these (human) objects will remain in its given motion unless this motion is contravened by collision with another body. Such a collision of human objects is conflict, since it limits the continuous (and therefore in Hobbes’ view free) motion of the individual. In a densely packed world, the natural state of man is thus the state of war. e purpose of science, as Hobbes understands it, is to organize the motion of both human and non-human bodies to maximize the unimpeded (and therefore free) motion of human beings.
The importance of free will is vastly diminished in Hobbes’ thought. In fact, Hobbes denies that human beings have a free will, characterizing the will as simply the last appetite before action. For Hobbes, human life is lived within nature and is always constrained by the natural world. Man is more a creature than a creator, more governed by laws than law-giving.
He is not a transcendent being who might imagine himself a god but an impelled object whose chief desire is to continue on his prescribed course with the least interference from others.
Most human beings in Hobbes’ view fear death and consent to be ruled in a state to achieve peace and maximize their free motion. The chief dangers to such rule and the peace it makes possible are the desire for glory (that characterized humanism) and the belief that our actions in this life can affect the life to come (that was central to the Reformation). e impact of the desire for glory is mitigated by the Leviathan, who Hobbes characterizes as a “mortal god,” since no one can compete with him for honor. The impact of religious passion is reduced by a correct understanding of predestination. Hobbes agrees with Luther and Calvin that everything is predestined but argues that it is precisely this fact that demonstrates that the things we do in this world have no impact on our salvation. If everything is already determined, then there is nothing anyone can do to either gain or lose salvation.
With the elimination of glory and beatitude as motives for human action, Hobbes believes human beings will be naturally inclined to pursue preservation and prosperity. These are lesser goods than earthy or super- natural glory, but they are also less likely to be the source of violent conflict. Hobbes thus seeks to make man master and possessor of nature not in order to achieve his apotheosis but in order to satisfy his natural, bodily desires.
There are other statements being made about “people not wanting to have children” that many could take umbrage with, and I do. These are mere assertions that appear contingent on a certain notion of man. It’s a can of worms to try and unpack a statement that is presented as true without much evidence. Frankly it seems a waste of time to do anything beyond assert the opposite that people in fact naturally do want children. The reader can then decide which they prefer. [1]
It is not to say of course that incentives don’t matter – they do. And of course they matter considerably more to modern society that frames itself in a fundamentally different way to those of the past. Ideology has always had a huge ability to impact humans: see baby killers of the Khmer Rouge. The problem of falling birth rates seems far more rooted in the ideology than simply tax breaks or money. Leftism subverts a lot.
Regardless of this and accusations of ‘wishy thinking’ the bigger issue at hand for me remains what appears casual acceptance of Hobbes. That brings about big implications that, as my quoting Gillespie was meant to show, call upon a lot of fundamentally modern assumptions and answers to old difficult questions. This does lead to troubling notions about how some feel that Cultural Marxism is ‘liberation’, and that the madness today is a result of people in some way ‘returning’ to their true essence. It is not. Everyday people privately struggle with the Leftist madness of how we are told the world is and everyday people rebel. It is not about liberation, it is about enslavement to nominalism.
1: It also strikes me as perhaps a bit odd to take such a Hobbesian view of man and yet to also casually dismiss Darwinian metaphysics, which even if we don’t fully agree with or buy into offers some good reasons why continued reproduction should and does happen.
“Indeed in making any claims about being a reactionary it would appear rejection of nominalism should be present.” Yes. Anything else is determinism really, and modernity is built atop determinism from Hobbes down as you note. Of course, this is not to ascribe to man a get out clause for cause and effect, only to acknowledge that free will and human ability to reason in the classical sense (the corruption of that terms is a thing that is a wonder to behold) is a reality. In some instances man acts on auto-pilot and without reason, and at his pinnacle he can engage reason.
Darwinism’s metaphysic and Hobbes are likely at odds in interesting ways, but you are right- if man is a beast that needs the pit and gallows, why would he not reproduce like every other beast? The instinct is there.
People are social animals, and Scripture tells us that we are sheep who need a good shepherd. We have leadership that has developed and enforced an entirely materialistic and hedonistic culture. People make the hedonic calculation that having another child would upset the delicate balance of work and finances, so they don’t have another. Trying to fix hedonism with more hedonism (financial incentives to have children) won’t work.
I know plenty of people with large families. They aren’t starving and do not live in squalor. They aren’t rich either, and often struggle to make ends meet. What they do have is an entirely different set of values from the norm. They are of course highly religious. If you reject modern materialism and hedonism and understand that life isn’t about personal happiness and comfort, then the desire for children is there. And guess what, they are all quite happy and comfortable, and fulfilled.
Well said.
People want children because God commands it and because God commands it, so does Darwin command it.
Antidem is a good friend of mine, but I think this is a case of him extrapolating his unique neurology and life experience onto the entire (Western) human race.