Day # 177 Calvin and Hobbes

No, not the tiger and the cute kid.  That Calvin and Hobbes did not have any huge issues with good and evil. Their value system was based on what was fun.

Speaking of fun, the other Calvin, John Calvin the Reformation preacher and the founder of Calvinism, was not.  He was, by most accounts, less fun than Martin Luther and that is no small feat.  John Calvin most assuredly viewed human beings as inherently evil and headed for damnation, each and every one.

But what about non-religious thinkers, if such could be found in Europe during the heady days of Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  What had they to say about good and evil?

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, believed that human beings were weak natured and capable of great mischief if left to their own devices.  As such, Hobbes believed the populi needed the benefit of a strong government to keep them out of trouble; an absolute sovereign being best for the welfare of the common man.  Out of fear for our base nature, we humans enter into a social contract to avoid the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" aspects that life takes on when people are left to their own whims without a strong central government.  Hobbes may have been fun, but he was not remembered as such.  Conservative, yes, fun, not so much.

I'll grant you that Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived and wrote after the spasms of the Reformation had mostly run their course, but he is still worth the trouble to remember.  Rousseau, being of the period know as the "Enlightenment", has a lighter view of the basic nature of humans.  Rousseau thought that men and women were basically good at heart and when left to themselves would choose the right course.  Jean-Jacques wrote of a different sort of social contract than Hobbes.  In Rousseau's view "Man is weak when he is dependent, and is his own master when he comes to be strong.."  Although briefly a Calvinist in his youth and then a Catholic, Rousseau is generally regarded as having been much more fun than Hobbes.

So, a strange dichotomy of sorts takes shape.  On the one hand, you have Hobbes, the conservative, who advocates a strong and controlling social contract for the role of government.  On the other, we have Mssr. Rousseau, of the liberal view, advocating a social contract that empowers the individual.

This is quite a stretch from todays political dogma in the USA where the "Conservatives" want the teeniest little government possible, save for an enormous standing Army, Navy and Airforce. The other side of the dogmatic coin has the "Liberals" who want the biggest and most expensive government possible especially if it can spend everybody else's money.

The only thing that remains the same is that the Conservatives still aren't as fun.