Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.
The "nasty brutish, and short" bit follows in an elaboration of this condition in the next paragraph.
and THIS is contradicted, if not by the article, then by the book it is reviewing. In particular:
To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our 'natural state'. Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare. In later periods, it's a different story. 'War does not go forever backwards in time,' says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. 'It had a beginning'
It is interesting to consider that part of the book, it does seem to disagree with Hobbes at first glance. Hobbes did say that the state of nature was violent. However I think he also thought that a fear of violence would spontaneously cause humankind to organise into societies. So I'm not sure he'd necessarily be that surprised to find a lack of evidence for prehistoric warfare.
https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-... does a good job of summarizing the data. Every archeological site on record and every primitive society we have been able to study records a rate of death by human violence that exceeds by orders of magnitude what is seen in modern civilized societies. In fact they all exceed what happened in the USA+Europe from 1900-1960, and usually by a large multiple. Even with 2 world wars, Western civilization killed fewer per capita in violence than any previous period in history that we have data for.
In short, Hobbes was right. Every attempt that I have seen at taking a quantitative approach has backed that up.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_...
What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent.
Further info:
The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'
> To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe. The first is true, if we compare Citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare Cities.
In other words, within a group we often see niceness, and between groups we often see nastiness - both are parts of human nature.
An alien threat would be the best thing ever for human cooperation. I'm not sure whether the aliens need to be real, as long as they feel real.
Or maybe too alien to suffice as a subanthropomorphisable They?
I do believe that e.g. Americans would be much more compliant in corona-mitigation-things like wearing masks if the narrative was "China has sent us a Virus to destroy us". But that would obviously also create serious issues because they'd demand revenge.
A secretive alien enemy has sent us a Virus, and they're also trying to cook us alive by heating up our planet. Are you going to just let them do it to us, or will you stand up and fight for our way of life, against the intergalactic threat? Now that's a They that can provide a We for Team Humanity, Leaders Of The Free Universe.
Plague has co-evolved with human civilization, for reasons adequately explained in Guns, Germs and Steel, among other places.
The ability to understand it, and take rational steps to mitigate it, is rather more new. SARS2 is arguably the first major pestilence to strike a human civilization which was coddled into the illusion that no such thing can happen to it.
Our spectrum of responses to that are fairly predictable to a student of history, but mixed with the peculiar impotence of a people who thought they had the power to stop this sort of thing, and have discovered they do not.
> In such condition [the state of nature] there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Or did I miss something obvious?
One of the differentiators here is that difference between intent and reality. Most everyone, even very bad people, typically believe they are behaving ethically and "doing good". It's just that sometimes one persons good is another's evil. That's one of the issues the Leviathan fixes - it prevents these kind of oversteps by keeping externally enforced standards on behavior.
I think you are misrepresenting Hobbes here. The essential idea of Hobbes' Leviathan was that men are selfish brutes/savages that require an overwhelming authority to pacify and tame. Hobbes' goal was to provide a justification for royalty. In other words, "community" cannot exist without a king because mankind is nasty and brutish.