In The State of Nature in New Orleans: What Hobbes Didn’t Know, Lee Harris takes issue with Hobbes’ notion that man’s “original state” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — because desperate people immediately band together, either to defend themselves or to pillage others — and then goes on to “correct” Aristotle’s notion of Natural Slaves:
Contrary to Aristotle’s claim, people were not enslaved because they scored low on IQ tests, or because they exhibited a high degree of co-dependency on standardized psychological profiles. They were made slaves because they could be made slaves; they were made slaves because they were too weak and too helpless to defend themselves against the ruthless and heartless warrior elite that happened to come across them.We have a first hand account of this process in Xenophon’s The Persian Expedition. Here the Greek mercenary forces who have found themselves trapped in the middle of the Persian Empire decide to fight their way back to Greece, and while on their way, they support themselves by capturing men, boys, girls, and women, herding them together and selling them at the next slave market they come to, in order to buy provisions for themselves. Does anyone feel the slightest guilt about it? No — none at all. Not more guilt than the young looters and rapists of New Orleans felt during their rampage.
So there are, in a way, natural slaves, just as there are, in a way, natural masters. Alas, it has always been the peaceful and the hard-working who have proven to be the natural slaves, and the ruthless and idle who have proven to be the natural masters.
That is the truth about the state of nature; and it is a truth that all liberals from the time of Thomas Hobbes have tried hard to hide from themselves.
Reason is not enough to make the strong and the ruthless renounce their natural mastery over the weak and frail.