A disquisition on government and selections from the Discourse Book

Well, I don't know what I was expecting, but not this. Or rather, I was expecting 'the noble savage' to play some sort of role and I got the noble savage , admittedly- so, I should be satisfied, but when people have told me about the noble savage in the past they have left things out. The main thing that excised is HE is a bloke, not just a man, a bloke. He is rarely happier than when he is on his own, he doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about stuff , there's no football, so, obviously, there is also something missing in his life that he can't quite put his finger on - but mostly his needs are met by what is immediately to hand. He lives in a forest and given how basic his needs are, they are all right there for the taking. Occasionally he will have sex with a noble savagess, but, as it is put so beautifully here - with more pleasure than ardour. And that just about sums up the book, in many ways. What the noble savagess gets up to in her spare time isn't really detailed here. The noble savage had his own individual language - by necessity it was pretty rudimentary, and it seems a bit hard to know why he bothered. This meant he wasn't particularly good at abstract thought. The savage was also without society, and so also without what get called here 'moral inequalities'. The inequalities that existed in this happy early phase of human history mostly involved getting older and slower than other noble savages. Otherwise, everyone was essentially equal.

In some ways this book is the paleo-diet version of philosophy. There is a strong belief that we humans were most happy in our 'native' state, and that any shift from that state has been debilitating - whether in terms of the food we eat, the society we live in, the medicine we use, the houses we live in - despite the remarkable extensions to our life expectancy due in large part to all of these.

The problem is that unlike us deciding to eat nuts and meat - or whatever it is that paleo-types think we used to eat in our 'the state of nature' - we can't really go back to the primordial forest - because, well, we chopped it down. And 'the good life' has perverted our tastes so much that now we can't be satisfied with less, or even just 'enough'.

This is all seriously pessimistic stuff - which is something else I hadn't quite expected either. We are condemned to a life that makes us miserable, and there is no escape.

The main problem was in developing agriculture. He makes the point that unless you have a society - and an unequal society at that - that agriculture is basically impossible. I thought this was an interesting idea. It is a bit like the tragedy of the commons, but perhaps more forcefully put. He says that if you do all of the work in ploughing and planting fields and growing grain and so on, unless you have some way of saying 'this is mine' and backing that up with some sort of force - when the time comes to harvest then others will take everything and leave you with nothing. So, agriculture was pointless until there was society. And with society then came all the evils associated with it - the need for laws, the problem of rulers and ruled, of 'the refinements of luxury and effeminacy'.

The part of this that I will remember of it, I think, is the surprise I had at finding him so certain that the base determination of the human condition is social isolation - the great individual standing free and depending solely upon his own ingenuity for his own well-being. This is basically wrong in every way. The only thing that makes us human is human society. He really could be describing Orangutans rather than humans. The idea that humans like such isolation seems an odd thing to have ever caught on. The whole things sounds too much like crushing loneliness - hardly something to be longed for.