Pandemic Philosophy: More Hobbes, Please
Understanding Hobbes through our pandemic state of nature
This post originally appeared on my website, http://schultzbergin.xyz, in the height of the pandemic.
I previously discussed how we can use pandemic hoarding behavior to better understand Hobbes’s ideas, as well as better understand hoarding behavior through Hobbes. In this post, I dig into a few other aspects of Hobbes’s work and apply it to issues that have arisen during the pandemic.
Uncertainty & Economic Productivity
According to Hobbes, in the state of nature, “there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain.” It is worth ruminating on that idea in light of the current pandemic. For, again, a common reading of Hobbes here would suggest that because everyone is selfish and just willing to steal from everyone else, no one can (or will) produce stuff. Of course, the immediate response is to note that not everyone is so terribly selfish and so there would be room, at least at some times in some places, for industry and “commodious building”.
But, if we instead understand Hobbes as emphasizing the motivational force of fear and anxiety, then this starts to make more sense. The issue isn’t so much about others stealing your stuff (although that isn’t irrelevant) but rather that without stable social norms you just have little reason to believe either that you will be able to complete any long-term project or that, if you do, it will amount to what you expected in the first place. When society is unstable, we both become bad at making long-term plans (due to fear and anxiety) but also it becomes somewhat irrational to make long-term plans (insofar as the instability really does justify the fear and anxiety).
And recall, too, that for Hobbes the events of the English Civil War functioned as experiments in a “state of nature”, even though it may have not wholly been as he described. The pandemic functions similarly for us. I have seen many people, especially academics (simply because I am an academic so interact with such people more), indicate their inability to work on any long-term projects or their uncertainty over whether they even should, since they don’t know if it will really amount to anything in the future.
Relatedly, it seems everyone is a prognosticator now, writing up views about what things will look like when (if?) this is all over. Interestingly, of course, most seem to suggest we will come out with a commitment to the views of justice, etc. that they have been advocating for decades (confirmation bias much?). Moreover, most are in direct contradiction to each other since they are coming from substantially distinct political ideologies. The best way to read this, for now at least, is that we don’t really know what things will look like “on the other side”. And, as such, anxiety over the future and a general lack of motivation to complete long-term projects is at least partly rational, at least more so than it was before.
Without established social norms which allow us to rationally plan our lives and carry out long-term projects, the economy understandably takes a hit. This, at root, is Hobbes’s insight about the value of law (and really social norms more broadly); it’s not centrally that they protect us from thieves and murderers (although they do that too) but rather that they establish stability which actually enhances our freedom by enhancing our ability to pursue our own lives our own way.
Social Distancing as a Collective Action Problem
It seems pretty clear that social distancing is an important step to getting a grip on this pandemic, and that everyone engaging in substantial social distancing for a concentrated period of time would, in the end, be good for all of us.
But I don’t want to. And, frankly, if I choose to go out with a few (young, healthy) friends, while everyone else practices social distancing, then we all still get the benefits of social distancing (and probably to basically the same degree) and I get the benefit of socializing. So, sounds to me like I should say screw social distancing!
But, of course, if everyone thought that way (as it appears many people did and probably still are) then we all end up losing the benefits of social distancing. We are all made worse off if each of us acts in a way that is individually rational.
This is a paradigm example of a collective action problem, and I previously noted that we can understand Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as a collective action problem (or a series of collective action problems). Ami Palmer went into more detail about this in his post on Hobbes and toilet paper hoarding (he focuses on “prisoner’s dilemmas” but a collective action problem is, more or less, just a large-scale prisoner’s dilemma).
For Hobbes, the solution to collective action problems like these was to create an entity strong enough to make it irrational for an individual to fail to do what is collectively rational. Most directly this can be through the threat of punishment since that threat increases the cost of acting in inappropriate ways. This is the sort of response we are seeing in some places, for instance when China fully quarantined an entire city, but also as various more liberal-democratic regimes now contemplate actually enforcing (through fines, etc.) social distancing or shelter-in-place rules.
One lesson from Hobbes is that we cannot really change peoples’ core motivations – while I think it is wrong to read Hobbes as suggesting people are all selfish, he is certainly apt to suggest all people are heavily self-interested. That includes, of course, just the psychological observation that when people are scared or anxious, they especially tend to be more insular and less caring about others (at least strangers and distant others). So, if you cannot change their motivations, you have to change the incentive structures around them so that their motivations lead them to behave in collectively beneficial ways (or at least not collectively harmful ways).
Given how many people said “screw it” to voluntary social distancing, it would seem that perhaps Hobbes was right here as well!