MAMA SAID EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

Not something I want to buy -- well, wait, actually, I do want to buy this, but buying it is not the issue. I want to have the time to read this.

An Essay on the History of Civil Society, by Adam Ferguson

Adam Ferguson is one of my favorites -- a priest, as well as a soldier in the nutso Scottish Army Regiment known as the Black Watch. Ferguson wrote a conjectural history of the development of human societies that stands in direct opposition to John Locke's slightly more famous version of homo sapiens' formative years.

Where Locke took his starting point to be the state of nature, Ferguson took a more realistic approach. For Ferguson, the most important factors that shape history are allegiance among people of the same group, and hostility between different groups.

THE starting point for Ferguson is our bodies. We lack fangs, claws, strength, speed, size. As animals go, we suck. But we have intelligence and can communicate. Our survival strategy was teamwork and intelligence. This was fine when people were few and clans were small. More people + better technology + more advanced societies = scarce resources = pressure to innovate = conflict = human history.

Ferguson argues that the problem with the state of nature is that it never existed empirically, among other things. Man is a social animal, our "state of nature" is to be in a society, however primitive. So in a sense there is no such thing as pre-political when it comes to our species.

Mankind are to be taken in groupes, as they have always
subsisted.

Also, do we really want to base the immutable truths of our society -- the foundation for the edifice of ethics we have constructed -- on what a bunch of cavemen did?

The difference between Locke and Ferguson was that Locke was being prescriptive -- he wanted his history to act as a justification for his political views, whereas Ferguson was attempting to be descriptive -- he wanted to really get to the heart of what makes human society tick -- an amoral history of Man.

The desire of laying the foundation of a favourite system, or
a fond expectation, perhaps, that we may be able to penetrate the
secrets of nature, to the very source of existence, have, on this
subject, led to many fruitless inquiries, and given rise to many
wild suppositions. Among the various qualities which mankind
possess, we select one or a few particulars on which to establish
a theory, and in framing our account of what man was in some
imaginary state of nature, we overlook what he has always
appeared within the reach of our own observation, and in the
records of history.  

In every other instance, however, the natural historian
thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to offer
conjectures. When he treats of any particular species of animals,
he supposes, that their present dispositions and instincts are
the same they originally had, and that their present manner of
life is a continuance of their first destination. He admits, that
his knowledge of the material system of the world consists in a
collection of facts, or at most, in general tenets derived from
particular observations and experiments. It is only in what
relates to himself, and in matters the most important, and the
most easily known, that he substitutes hypothesis instead of
reality, and confounds the provinces of imagination and reason,
of poetry and science.

P.S. Yes, I know nobody cares about this shit but me.
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