Back to work on picking through Hobbes' arguments and trying to fasten Darwin's ideas to them as clarifying or contrasting. The main came, and it was quite a sight: shrimp, cod, salmon, trout all prepared wondefully with vegetables and seasoned mashed potatoes. The chef had even replaced the mushroom sauce for a lemon cream one after hearing that I did not normally enjoy mushrooms. I started to eat, drink my wine, work, and repeat. I got a lot done towards getting my ideas clarified I think. My bill came with a homemade, chocolate truffle, and the waitress apologised for the seran saying it was used to hold the terrine together. I told her I knew, and thanked her. I was not charged for it, which was really nice considering the expense of the meal. I paid and tipped and left very full.
Walking home, I stopped to bum a smoke off a guy passing. We both seemed really cool in the moment. I sat to finish it at the end of my street, and two guys stopped to ask me for directions to a place to eat. They were looking for a place on George, so I told them roughly how to get there. I can undestand Hobbes' view that we are all utterly equal, but I just don't see the hostility of his perpetual state of war. My encounters are all equal and peaceful. I know I live in a governed state, and so there is peace in as much as Hobbes states what peace is. My point is that passing generations that are born and come of age in peace, will not have the same nature of war as Hobbes finds, and will in turn not raise their children with those qualities. Darwin's evolution survives in our brains. As the majority of humanity remains in a governed peace, the control of the government will fall to the peaceful as time passes. If the Leviathans of Hobbes--human nature manifest in larger, governed populations--were as equal as the individuals that comprised them, this succession to the peaceful would inturn create leviathans that better resembled the peace in their populations--not warring amongst each other. Through the passage of time, and Darwin's idea of our ability to control our species' evolution through nurture, this state of peace would spread and remain given the collapse of a greater power. A greater power would be redundant. The future is speculative. What I see in the present is a movement towards non violence as if it were a social covenant. Vegetarians' rise in social stature, breaking class barriers with ultimate morality, have pushed the economy to provide for them. Whole communities are moving out of the wider social circle to get off of the larger power grid that has a source deemed detrimental to the natural environment. Movement seems to trend towards the embracing of the natural world, where Hobbes found the goal to be removal from it. It would appear that while reciprocity can be enforced by a higher power in a society, Darwin's idea that reciprocity is innate in man, and in all of the natural web of being qualifies it as truth and natural justice.
I am just trying to clarify my own thoughts. My voice is important in this paper and I don't want to lose it to Darwin and Hobbes.
I got a package to pick up tomorrow. Could it be Djarums? I will happy to not find myself smoking bummed number7s! It is a good day.
PEACE - Tristan
before || after
